We first analyse legal provisions relating to corporate transparency in Germany. We show that despite the new securities trading law (WpHG) of 1995, the practical efficacy of disclosure regulation is very low. On the one hand, the formation of business groups involving less regulated legal forms...

We test recent theories of when companies go public which predict that 1) more companies will go public when outside valuations are high or have increased, 2) companies prefer going public when uncertainty about their future profitability is high, and 3) firms whose controlling shareholders...

We analyze allocations to institutional and retail investors in 441 initial public offerings (IPOs). In addition to the well-known favorable first-day returns, we show that institutions also obtain more allocations in IPOs with better long-term performance. We find that initial institutional...

In this study we integrate evidence about managers' personal beliefs about their firms' prospects into an analysis of managerial decisions on acquisitions and takeover resistance. We examine insider trading (a proxy for personal beliefs) around significant corporate acquisitions and find little...

This paper presents the authors' investigation of the factors that determine secondary market prices of developing country syndicated loans. Trading volume in this market has almost doubled yearly from 1985 to 1988, while average market prices declined from 73 percent to 41 percent of par value...

We study pre-trade transparency by looking at the introduction of NYSE's OpenBook service that provides limit-order book information to traders off the exchange floor. We find that traders attempt to manage limit-order exposure: They submit smaller orders and cancel orders faster. Specialists'...

We construct a long daily panel of short sales using proprietary NYSE order data. From 2000 to 2004, shorting accounts for more than 12.9% of NYSE volume, suggesting that shorting constraints are not widespread. As a group, these short sellers are well informed. Heavily shorted stocks...

Using a broad panel of NYSE-listed stocks between 1983 and 2004, we study the relation between institutional shareholdings and the relative informational efficiency of prices, measured as deviations from a random walk. Stocks with greater institutional ownership are priced more efficiently, and...