In this paper we analyze the monitoring role of different types of shareholder groups in the UK. We relate the objectives, structure and overall share holding of each shareholder group to their incentives to monitor companies in which they hold large stakes. We find that shareholder groups are...

We investigate the takeover strategies of high default risk acquirers and their value impact. We find that these bidders select bigger, less profitable and unrelated targets, pursue transactions during recessions, and pay with shares by offering target shareholders high premiums. Their long-term...

We provide a cross-country evidence on the impact of corporate and personal income taxes, and corporate governance systems on debt maturity structures and leverage using a comprehensive sample of 212,642 firm-year observations based on a sample of 19,573 firms from 24 OECD countries over the...

We document stock price behaviour in the period following a stock market stress. We focus on price behaviour using daily market indexes from 39 stock exchanges. Our results are not consistent with the overreaction hypothesis. We find positive (negative) abnormal price performance in the...

We analyze the reasons why companies issue units when they raise additional capital. We find that, in contrast to previous evidence, units are not offered to mitigate the agency conflicts or to signal security mispricing as they are predominantly issued during cold periods, in public rather than...

I analyse the tax systems and tax reforms in Germany and the U.K. and test the hypothesis that ex-day returns are related to each country's tax differential between dividends and capital gains. The results indicate that in the U.K., where this tax differential is high and short-term trading is...

We analyze the time-series distribution of large blockholders and managerial ownership in the UK over the last decade. We find a significant decrease in the size of block ownership of a large number of companies. We show that the increase in firm's size and risk and the decrease in performance...

We analyze the motives and market valuation of voluntarily de-listing from the London Stock Exchange. We show that firms that de-list voluntarily are likely to have come to the market to re-balance their leverage rather than to finance their growth opportunities. During their quotation life,...

Previous studies concluded that investors suffer from the 52-week high/low anchoring biases. We expand this evidence to corporate insiders, the conventionally viewed as informed traders. We find that they systematically trade profitably at these price extremes by exploiting anchoring biases of...