This paper examines how family and non-family ownership affects the performance of Swiss listed firms from 2003 to 2010. We distinguish between these two types of controlling shareholders since they have different objectives. We hypothesise that only family shareholders have a real incentive to...

Using investors' trading horizons to capture their incentives to collect information and monitor management's decisions, this paper shows that an increase in the ownership stake held by long-term institutional investors is associated with a subsequent decrease in real investment precisely in...

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in timing their trades and engaging in stealth trading, e.g., by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements were...

Using Swedish bank lending data, investment data and accounting data, I examine how the financial crisis affected corporate investment through its effect on credit availability. Sensitivity to a credit supply shock is measured as credit reserves, defined as unused credit on lines of credit. I...

This paper aims to test the accuracy of three well-known equity valuation models for the period 1990 to 2006. This was done to a sample of German listed firms which diverge from the US market in accounting standards, market maturity and corporate governance culture (bank-based in contrast to the...

In contrast to the popular assumption of independence made in the classic corporate finance literature, many companies around the world are linked through common ownership to form business groups. This paper reviews the growing literature on the consequences of business group membership. The...

This study examines the cash policies of business group members (i.e., affiliates). Using a panel dataset of private Belgian affiliates and comparable non-affiliated firms, the empirical results show that business group affiliates hold significantly smaller amounts of cash as compared to...

We examine the relation between employee protection legislation and corporate cash holdings. As wages become less elastic in a firm's production function, precautionary savings are expected to increase. We show that the staggered passage of legal exceptions to the “at-will” employment...

We use nearly 500 shifts in statutory corporate and personal income tax rates as natural experiments to assess the effect of corporate and personal taxes on capital structure. We find both corporate and personal income taxes to be significant determinants of capital structure. Based on ex-post...

Private Equity Demystified is published as part of the ICAEW Corporate Finance Faculty's thought leadership programme, Financing Change and includes a review of major academic studies on private equity globally. This not only outlines what is known, but highlights what isn't yet known about the...