This paper examines the quality of financial statements reported by private equity (PE) backed companies in the years around the initial PE investment. We study both pre- and postinvestment earnings characteristics of a unique hand-collected sample of 556 Belgian unlisted companies, receiving PE...

timeliness of financial reporting in Belgium. The analysis is based on a sample of 1892 non-financial Belgian companies for 1996. The contribution of this paper is to investigate how external financing affects the timeliness of financial reporting of closely held companies in continental Europe....

Holding companies, which play an important role in corporate finance in Belgium and in other Continental European countries, often trade at a discount to their estimated net asset value (NAV). First, we discuss possible explanations for this discount: holding company destroys value, NAV...

effective tax rate (ETR) and face a less positive association between pre-tax income and ETRs than independent firms. These findings suggest that individual group members apply efficient tax planning techniques in order to minimize taxes at the group level. We hypothesize that group firms...

We analyze the impact of bank relationships on the performance of Belgian firms listed on the Brussels stock exchange at the start of the Great Depression, in 1929–1931. Most of these firms were affiliated with one or more banks via interlocking directorships. Taking into account the number of...

This study investigates cash policies of multinational corporations (MNCs) for a large sample of European MNCs and their subsidiaries in the period 1998-2004. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that cash holdings depend on a trade-off between the superior knowledge of the subsidiary...

We investigate the impact of universal banks on the performance and the risk of affiliated companies in an unregulated environment with booming financial markets. For a unique sample of 129 Belgian companies listed in the period 1905-1909, we find that universal bank affiliation had a positive...

We investigate the determinants of interlocking directorates and their impact on company performance for a Belgian sample of 286 companies affiliated with a business group and 2,136 stand-alone companies. Most of these companies are not listed. We find that companies belonging to a group have...

This study investigates whether capital structure theory can explain debt ratios in an historical environment which was characterized by poor investor protection, booming stock markets and strong banks, and in which corporate income tax did not affect capital structure. Our results, based on a...

In this paper, pre-IPO value estimations by the lead underwriting investment bank of Belgian IPO stocks are compared to the offer price and the stock price in the first month of listing. The valuation methods used by the lead underwriter and the estimated values are often discussed in Belgian...