This paper reopens the debate on the substitutability of dividends and shareholder control in mitigating free cash flow concerns, by examining dividend behavior when shareholder control is restricted in the firm.We consider the stakeholder-oriented governance regime of the Netherlands, where...

This paper provides an overview of existing research on how corporate restructuring affects the wealth of creditors.Restructuring is defined as any transaction that affects the firm's underlying capital structure.Thus, it reaches well beyond asset restructuring and includes transactions such as...

This paper provides evidence on the corporate governance role of shareholderinitiated proxy proposals. Previous studies debate over whether activists use proxy proposals to discipline firms or to simply advance their self-serving agendas, and whether proxy proposals are effective at all in...

This paper is the first to investigate the corporate governance role of shareholderinitiated proxy proposals in European firms. While proposals in the US are nonbinding even if they pass the shareholder vote, they are legally binding in the UK and most of Continental Europe. Nonetheless,...

A positive relation between confidence and effort/investment provision has been<br/>theoretically justified and practically assumed in the literature, but has not been<br/>thoroughly investigated. We test and confirm this positive relation between direct<br/>measures of confidence and choice of effort or...

The art market is subject to frequent booms and busts in both prices and volume,<br/>which are difficult to reconcile with models where agents are rational and<br/>hold homogenous beliefs. This paper shows that (i) volume is mainly driven by<br/>speculative transactions; (ii) positive price-volume correlation...

We analyze the payout channel choice of listed UK firms and examine whether the choice between dividends, share repurchases, a combination of payout channels, or complete earnings retention is affected by investor sentiment, taxation, major shareholder ownership, and in particular the CEO’s...

We investigate the fundamental determinants and value implications of corporate social responsibility (CSR) around the world. We contrast three broad views on CSR: (1) it is a response to government failure; (2) it reflects individual and societal preferences; (3) it is an equilibrium result of a...

For the 5th takeover wave, European M&As were expected to create significant takeover value: the announcement reactions were strongly positive for target shareholders (more than 35%) and the bidding shareholders also expected to gain a small though significant increase in market value of...