We examine a sample of 1,458 divestitures of domestic assets by U.S. firms to foreign and domestic buyers over the period 1998-2008. Cross-border asset sales yield higher abnormal returns to the seller than domestic sales. This incremental return is driven by liquidity-constrained sellers...

The role of high leverage in corporate restructuring, popularity of junk bonds (original-issue, high-yield bonds) and the savings & loan crisis have been important aspects of the finance scene in the 1980s. A very active academic literature has developed in recent years on dealing with financial...

This article examines the incentive features of top-management compensation in the banking industry. Economic theory suggests that the compensation structures for bank management should have low pay-performance sensitivity because of the high leverage of banks and the fact that banks are...

The authors show that the regulation requiring corporate insiders to disclose their trades ex post creates incentives for informed insiders to manipulate the market by sometimes trading against their information. This allows them to increase their trading profits by maintaining their information...

This article studies how collateral affects bond yields. Using a large data set of public bonds, we document that collateralized debt has higher yield than general debt, after controlling for credit rating. Our model of agency problems between managers and claim holders explains this puzzling...

Under incomplete contracting, limited liability creates differential valuations of investments from private and government perspectives. Managers in the private sector tend to over-invest in risky technologies, compared to levels of investment that are optimal from the standpoint of the society...

This paper investigates the design of privatization mechanisms in emerging market economies. We identify an emerging market economy by the political constraints that limit the set of viable privatization mechanisms. Our objective is to explain the striking diversity of privatization mechanisms...