Recent studies have documented systematic exchanges of favors between politicians and firms, and that connected firms, on average gain from political ties. Since these ties are often to a top manager or large shareholder, agency problems are likely more severe for politically connected firms....

We hypothesize that firms structure their asset holdings so as to shelter assets from extraction by politicians and bureaucrats. Specifically, in countries where the threat of political extraction is higher, we hypothesize that firms will hold a lower fraction of their assets in liquid form....

I investigate the sources of value gains in public-to-private transactions by examining the wealth effects on industry rivals of target firms. For a sample of 279 public-to-private bids in the U.S. from 1980 to 2007, I find that agency hypothesis explains more of the cross-sectional variation in...

Analysis of a worldwide sample of sudden deaths of politicians reveals a market-adjusted 1.7% decline in the value of companies headquartered in the politician's hometown. The decline in value is followed by a drop in the rate of growth in sales and access to credit. Our results are particularly...

We analyze the monitoring role of occupational pension funds, the largest category of shareholders in the UK. Our hypothesis is that, unlike other financial institutions, occupational pension funds are expected to monitor companies in which they hold large stakes because of their objectives,...

We hypothesize that firms structure their asset holdings so as to shelter assets from extraction by politicians and bureaucrats. In countries where the threat of political extraction is higher, we hypothesize that firms hold a lower fraction of their assets in liquid form. Consistent with this...

Using new data for the universe of firms covered in Amadeus, we reconstruct the portfolios of shareholders who hold equity stakes in private and publicly-traded European firms. We find great heterogeneity in the degree of portfolio diversification across large shareholders. Exploiting this...

We document that the quality of earnings reported by politically connected firms is significantly poorer than that of similar non-connected companies. Moreover, we find that earnings quality has no predictive power for the likelihood of establishing connections. Hence, we rule out that our...

An important and growing literature in finance points to existence of considerable benefits to being a controlling shareholder. At the same time, the well-established literature on mergers finds these key corporate events to be subject to agency costs. Relying on these two arguments, we employ a...