This paper focuses on dominant owners' use of leverage to finance their blockholdings and its relationship to dividend policy. We postulate that blockholder leverage may impact payout policy, in particular when earnings are hit by a negative shock. We use panel data for France where blockholders...

This paper investigates whether top executives have significant individual-specific effects on accruals that cannot be explained by firm characteristics. Exploiting 37 years of individual executive and firm data, we find that individual executives play a significant role in determining firms'...

A controlling shareholder can pledge shares to secure personal loans while retaining control of the firm, but share pledging increases the risk of a margin call and the possibility of losing control of the firm. We investigate how share pledging by controlling shareholders influences the...

In common-interest spatial-dispersion games the agents' common goal is to choose distinct locations. We experimentally investigate the role of cognition in such games and compare it with the role of cognition in spatial matching games. In our setup cognition matters because agents may be...