Using data from 34 countries, this paper examines how each country's financial system and cultural ideology interact with globalization to impact the capability of firms to exploit external (i.e., capital and labor) and internal (i.e., research and development and intangible capital) advantages....

Although the role of institutional investors as shareholders has been widely studied, the literature provides little evidence on the role of institutional investors as directors. Therefore, this article analyzes the influence of directors who represent institutional investors in three aspects of...

In this paper we examine whether the presence of institutional investors representatives on boards leads to observable differences in corporate finance. We use a panel of 162 quoted Spanish nonfinancial firms from 2004 to 2010. We find that institutional directors have diverse incentives to...

This article studies how sensitive real option valuations are to incorrect assumptions about the stochastic process followed by the state variables. We design a valuation model which combines Monte Carlo simulation and dynamic programming and provides an appropriate framework to evaluate the...

This paper aims to examine how investors' expectations about the value of a firm's real options are reflected in the price of its stocks. If the real-option approach is correct, then the efficient-market hypothesis predicts that stock prices will reflect the available information relative to the...

One of the arguments to explain the existence of anomalies in capital markets is the existence of cognitive biases in the behaviour of investors. Our goal is to study one of these cognitive biases: herding among investors. Our laboratory experiment results lead us to reject that subjects'...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the ownership and control structure of Spanish commercial banks during the period 1996-2004. Using the methodology of control chains our data shows that 97% of Spanish commercial banks have an ultimate controlling owner. In concrete, families are the main...