It is widely held that for tax reasons corporate shareholders are the only shareholders that prefer dividends to capital gains. This has led to clientele models where corporate blockholders migrate to firms paying dividends and use their voting power to increase dividends in these firms. We use...

There are two ways to buy a large-percentage block of stock - from another shareholder or directly from the corporation. Because the traded asset is the same, one might expect the pricing of these transactions to be similar. Block trades, however, are priced at an 11% premium to the...

Using a comprehensive database of American prisoners of war (POWs) during World War II, we find that survival from captivity generally declines as the hierarchy of a prisoner's group becomes steeper or more closely matches the military's established hierarchy. There is no evidence that survival...

We re-examine old evidence and provide new evidence on private placements of large-percentage blocks of stock. Our goal is to judge whether the prevailing hypotheses of monitoring and certification explain most private placements. Examining new evidence on events following the private placement...

Sixteen measures of legal protections for public market investors, including the Anti-Director Rights Index, the Anti-Self-Dealing Index, and legal origins, are all unrelated to ownership concentration in a large and representative sample of firms from 32 countries. Furthermore, when laws were...

As a country's attitude toward egalitarianism increases, which means a societal preference for the equal as opposed to hierarchical treatment of individuals, the ownership of the public corporations in the country becomes more concentrated. This finding is robust to a wide range of...

We document that ownership by officers and directors of publicly-traded firms is on average higher today than earlier in the century. Managerial ownership rises from 13 percent for the universe of exchange-listed corporations in 1935, the earliest year for which such data exist, to 21 percent in...

Existing research on cross-country differences in ownership concentration analyzes country averages of ownership concentration instead of firm-level data. This creates omitted-variable and aggregation biases. Most papers also use small samples of large firms. This makes inferences to country...

The original cost regulatory system, as currently used in the regulation of utilities and natural gas pipelines, cannot emulate the response of a competitive firm to high and varying inflation. Although there can be many problems introduced by regulatory lag and by high administrative and...

We document that ownership by officers and directors of publicly-traded firms is on average higher today than earlier in the century. Managerial ownership rises from 13 percent for the universe of exchange-listed corporations in 1935, the earliest year for which such data exist, to 21 percent in...