We propose that stronger creditor rights in bankruptcy reduce corporate risk-taking. Employing country-level data, we find that strong creditor rights are associated with a greater propensity of firms to engage in diversifying mergers, and this propensity changes in response to changes in the...

We extend our prior work on how both supply (including the emergence of OTC equity derivatives and growth in share lending) and demand (including the growth of hedge funds) factors now facilitate the large-scale, low-cost decoupling of shareholder voting rights from shareholder economic...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the financial structure of large recent buyouts. We collect detailed information of the financings of 153 large buyouts (averaging over $1 billion in enterprise value). We document the manner in which these important transactions are financed. Buyout...

How do liquidation values affect financial contract renegotiation? While the 'incomplete contracting' theory of financial contracting predicts that liquidation values determine the allocation of bargaining power between creditors and debtors, there is little empirical evidence on financial...

This study investigates the determinants of changes in corporate ownership and firm failure, taking into account different types of sellers and buyers of control blocks. For a large panel of German corporations we find that firms are more likely to fail or to be sold when performance is poor,...

U.S. venture capital financings of U.S. entrepreneurial firms with up to 213 observations is consistent with the proposition that convertible preferred equity is the optimal form of venture capital finance. This paper introduces new evidence from 208 U.S. venture capital financings of Canadian...

This paper introduces a dataset on forms of finance used in 12,363 Canadian and US venture capital and private equity financings of Canadian entrepreneurial firms from 1991 to 2003. The data comprise different types of venture capital institutions, including corporate, limited partnership,...

Voluntary liquidations offer an interesting example of efficient and orderly asset reallocation. This study examines why firms liquidate, and what happens to their assets. One important determinant of voluntary liquidation concerns asset performance and marketability: liquidating firms have low...

This survey paper examines existing theories of capital structure and related empirical tests with the aim to derive theoretical as well empirically testable predictions about the implications of the soft budget constraint for corporate capital structure. We show that the soft budget constraint...

US public companies recently filed, for the second or third time, management and auditor reports on internal control as required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (404 reports). This Special Comment summarizes our experience and findings on the credit implications of these reports