It is often argued that Anglo-Saxon corporate governance systems place more emphasis on short-term results than do corporate governance systems in continental European countries, such as Germany and the Netherlands. Empirical evidence on this is scarce and often contradictory. This paper...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how scale and scope of operations, firm age, and the choice to join a franchise formula influences brokerage firms' efficiency. Design/methodology/approach – Four‐year data of 1,282 Dutch real estate brokerage firms is used to compute a...

Municipalities may have various motives for decisions on the mode of their task execution. Empirical studies – based on both public choice and transaction costs theory - have not yet provided a fully comprehensive explanation for municipal contracting out decisions. Therefore, we held...

We examine the impact of mutual fund ownership on stock price informativeness in China. Existing evidence shows that stock price informativeness is low in China, and attributes this to firms' lack of disclosure incentives under the weak investor protection institutional environment. Mutual funds...

Focusing on the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998, we document increased audit quality (measured by earnings quality of the clients) for the merged firm and other big-X auditors 1 during the post-merger period because: 1) controlling for economic conditions, clients of...

This paper studies the price implication of media censorship in the context of the long-standing foreign share discount puzzle in China. We conjecture that the government censors negative news and promotes positive news in Chinese media, leading to the premium on A-shares, which are mainly...

We use the search volume index (SVI) of the stock ticker provided by Google Trends to capture the active attention that retail investors pay to stocks. Based on the analysis of S&P 500 stocks from 2004 to 2009, we show that the majority of the variation in SVI cannot be explained by passive...