We study the benefits of opening up local equity markets to foreign institutional investors using data on Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) in China around the reform floating non-tradable shares. We find evidence supporting the view (Stulz (1999)) that as “outsiders,”...

This Article reports results of an empirical study that suggests that the current economic crisis has changed managerial behavior in the US in a way that may impede economic recovery. The study finds a strong, statistically significant and economically meaningful, positive correlation between...

This paper analyzes whether the political connections of listed firms in the United States affect the cost and terms of loan contracts. Using a hand-collected data set of the political connections of S&P 500 companies over the 2003-2008 time period, we find that the cost of bank loans is...

Executive compensation in the U.S. banking industry has been criticized as a root cause of the recent financial crisis. This study examines the relationship between executive compensation, ownership structure, and firm performance for Chinese financial corporations during 2001-2009. The results...

Companies are sometimes accused of misleading the market. The SEC can punish this with enforcement actions. Alternatively, shareholders can seek redress through a shareholder class action (SCA). Thus, using a sample of 416 securities class actions, this paper shows that SCAs are a catalyst to...

Over the period 1980-2007 multinational firms' investment grew four times faster than worldwide GDP. Yet the evidence on whether global diversification is valuable is inconclusive. This paper uses detailed FDI data for 251 UK multinational firms and 4,676 subsidiaries to show that multinational...

The paper's purpose is to quantify the performance of a State in its action as a de facto LBO specialist, taking companies private to restructure them and subsequently reselling them in the share market. A sample comprising all the listed companies nationalized in Portugal in 1975 and 1976 that...

In December 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued new rules that require the disclosure of the use of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in CEO compensation contracts. We find that about a third of the sample firms use RPE in the CEO compensation contract. On average, RPE users...

We are making the firm-level corporate governance index used in Aggarwal, Erel, Ferreira and Matos (2010) available. The data covers 23 countries for the period 2004-2008. Non-U.S. firms in the sample account for approximately 71% of world market capitalization excluding the U.S.; and U.S. firms...

We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and activist institutional...