A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

In many countries, the legal system or social norms ensure that firms are stakeholder oriented. We analyze the advantages and disadvantages of stakeholder-oriented firms that are concerned with employees and suppliers compared to shareholder-oriented firms in a model of imperfect competition....

The financing of infrastructures is a major topic in recent energy policy debates. Project finance, as a specialized form of debt finance, thereby has become a well-established financing tool. This paper contributes a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the determinants of the debt ratio in...

We conduct an event study to assess the stock market evaluation of public takeover announcements. Unlike the majority of previous research, we specifically focus on acquisitions targeted at newly public IPO-firms and show that the stock market positively evaluates these M&As as R&D. However,...

The benefits of family ownership and control of firms are at the center of the family firm debate. Previous studies have used either family ownership or management as proxies for control. Both indicators are off the mark, as they do not measure "decision control" as intended by the theory of the...

When innovation is cumulative, patent protection on early inventions can generate holdup problems if later complementary patents are owned by different firms. Consistent with the property rights literature, we show that shareholder ownership overlap across firms with patent complementarities...

The rivals of LBO targets experience an abnormal return on equity of 1.2% in the seven day window surrounding the LBO announcement. There are three hypotheses that may explain the wealth effects: the Pure Acquisition Hypothesis, the Competition Dynamics Hypothesis, and the Private Information...

We investigate the relation of board structure through the appointments of outside directors and the role of busy directors on firm return on assets within an environment of no regulation for privately held firms and voluntary adoption of corporate best practices for security issuers with family...

We find a significant hump-shaped relation between firm valuation and CEO ownership when external governance (EG) is weak, but the relation is insignificant when EG is strong. These interactive effects are identified while controlling for firm-fixed effects. The results imply that CEO ownership...