We study how political factors shape competition in the mobile telecommunication sector. We show that the way a government designs the rules of the game has an impact on concentration, competition, and prices. Pro-competition regulation reduces prices, but does not hurt quality of services or...

Among firms listed in Western Europe and East Asia, when creditor protection is strong, the controlling shareholder trades off retaining control in bad states through pyramiding against retaining the upside in good states via leverage. This result might arise because the controlling shareholder...

An important and growing literature in finance points to existence of considerable benefits to being a controlling shareholder. At the same time, the well-established literature on mergers finds these key corporate events to be subject to agency costs. Relying on these two arguments, we employ a...