Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare the short‐term trading behaviour of A shares owned by domestic investors and their dually‐traded B shares owned by foreign investors, after a period of significant price change. Design/methodology/approach – Given that the fundamentals of...

Previous studies concluded that investors suffer from the 52-week high/low anchoring biases. We expand this evidence to corporate insiders, the conventionally viewed as informed traders. We find that they systematically trade profitably at these price extremes by exploiting anchoring biases of...

We study the evolution of the control structure of 141 privatized firms from OECD countries over the period from 1996 through 2000. We find that governments do not relinquish control after "privatization." We show that the market-to-book ratios of privatized firms converge through time to those...

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...

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...