We examine changes to corporate ownership in nine East Asian countries following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Countries with lower incomes and in which policy making involves greater transactions costs (i.e., veto points) have more firms with state ownership. Partial state ownership appears...

We document a positive association between political uncertainty and accounting conservatism. In the year prior to a U.S. presidential election, on average, accounting conservatism increases by nearly 20 percent. This election year effect is stronger when the election is closer, when the...

We document a positive association between political uncertainty and accounting conservatism. In the year prior to a U.S. presidential election, on average, accounting conservatism increases by nearly 20 percent. This election year effect is stronger when the election is closer, when the...

Election periods are associated with uncertainty about future governmental structure and public policy, i.e., political uncertainty, leading to an increase in agency costs. As a response to rising agency costs, we find that in the year prior to a U.S. presidential election, accounting...

This paper studies the short- and long-run announcement effects of declaring compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code (the Code). We examine a unique, hand-collected data set of 317 German listed firms from 2002-2005. First, we present evidence from an analysis of firms compliance...

Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lowerexpected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. Thispaper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governancealso help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms...

Die aktuelle Corporate Governance Literatur stützt die verbreitete Hypothe-se, dass sicht „gute“ Corporate Governance durch eine höhere Unterneh-mensbewertung manifestiert. Die Mehrzahl der empirischen Studien unter-sucht jedoch nur ausgewählte Corporate Governance Mechanismen...

Using a comprehensive set of listed Swiss companies, our findings suggestthat the size of the board of directors is an independent control mechanism.However, in contrast to previous studies, we do not find a significant rela-tionship between board size and firm performance. This suggests that...

Relying on a US bank sample, we document the double-edged sword of dividends on the bank's riskiness. Paying dividends exposes banks to stricter market discipline, then decreases the risk-taking behaviors of bank management compared with non-payers, consistent with the Dividend-Stability...

In the late nineteenth century Britain had almost no mandatory shareholder protections, but had very developed financial markets. We argue that private contracting between shareholders and corporations meant that the absence of statutory protections was immaterial. Using circa 500 articles of...