Gaining access to technologies, competencies, and knowledge is observed as one of the major motives for corporate mergers and acquisitions. In this paper we show that a knowledge-based firm's probability of being a takeover target is influenced by whether relevant specific human capital aimed...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed 'hard' information about the board's...

We analyze the long-term effects of firm break-up and ownership change on corporate performance. Our analysis is based on a unique data set for a large number of Czech firms spanning the period 1996-2005. We employ a propensity score matching procedure to deal with endogeneity problems. Our...

We argue in favor of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle about the ultimate goal of the company....

Rhodes-Kropf and Viswanathan (2004) suggest an adverse selection role of corporate cash reserve. Specifically, if investors know a bidder does not have to issue to invest, an attempt to do so sends a strong pessimistic signal of overvaluation. Despite its intuitiveness, this notion has not been...

I show that ownership by blockholding and board composition is an important determinant of corporate debt maturity structure. Using GMM methodology to control for the potential endogeneity of all regressors, I find a statistically and economically significant negative relation between shortterm...

We examine the role of institutional investors in financial markets and in corporate governance. In many countries, institutional investors have become the predominant players in financial markets and their influence worldwide is growing, chiefly due to the privatization and development of...

We document that firms in eight East Asian countries and Japan diversify into more segments and engage into more related businessesas measured by the degree of vertical relatedness and complementaritythan firms in the USA. Using data for the 1990-6 period, we observe a trend towards...

This paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-6. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to...

We analyze the impact of corporate governance institutions, ownership structures and external capital market constraints on company returns on investment by using a sample of more than 19,000 companies from 61 countries across the world. We show that (1) of these three sets of institutions, the...