We hypothesize that firms structure their asset holdings so as to shelter assets from extraction by politicians and bureaucrats. In countries where the threat of political extraction is higher, we hypothesize that firms hold a lower fraction of their assets in liquid form. Consistent with this...

We study the stock price response to announcements of share purchases by corporate insiders over the period 1994 through 1999. The cross-sectional variability in the response is consistent with a curvilinear relation between firm value and insider ownership, where the value of the firm first...

This paper evaluates the conjecture that excess stock returns that have been documented around the announcement of corporate spin-offs represent, at least in part, the re-creation of value destroyed at the time of an earlier acquisition. We evaluate this question with a sample of spin-offs that...

Prior studies have reported a positive correlation between insider trading and stock price changes implying that insider (i.e., informed) trades affect price discovery differently than non-insider (i.e., uninformed) trades. Based on these results, various scholars have argued for the...

During the 1990s and beyond, countries around the world witnessed calls and/or mandates for more outside directors on publicly traded companies' boards even though extant studies find no significant correlation between outside directors and corporate performance. We examine the connection...

A number of studies have reported value discounts for listed companies in countries that provide weak legal protection to minority shareholders. Such studies typically attribute these discounts to the ability, and the well-documented tendency, of controlling shareholders to extract a...

We analyze the likelihood of government bailouts of 450 politically connected firms from 35 countries during 1997-2002. Politically connected firms are significantly more likely to be bailed out than similar nonconnected firms. Additionally, politically connected firms are disproportionately...