This paper analyzes the degree and type of private equity firm activism in portfolio companies. Using hand-collected data on 211 private equity investments over the period 1997-2009, we are able to distinguish between different kinds of activism of private equity firms such as board and...

This paper analyzes capital market reactions to international bank M&A. We investigate the combined stock return patterns of targets, bidders, and their peers upon takeover announcement, and closing or withdrawal. We distinguish five common M&A hypotheses and relate characteristic and mutually...

This paper compares the stability of the U.S. Dual Banking system's two bank groups, national and state banks, in light of the global financial crisis 2007/2008. The goal of the paper is to answer three distinct questions: first, is there a difference in the (balance sheet-) fragility between...

This paper analyzes the roles of corporate governance in bank defaults during the recent financial crisis of 2007-2010. Using a data sample of 249 default and 4,021 no default US commercial banks, we investigate the impact of bank ownership and management structures on the probability of...

This paper analyzes Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) in Europe. We document various aspects associated with European SPACs by using a unique and hand-collected data sample encompassing all 19 SPACs which have been listed on European stock exchanges since 2005. The paper shows that...

This paper analyzes exit strategies of buyout funds in their portfolio companies following Initial Public Offerings. We use a data set of 222 buyout-backed IPOs in the United States between 1999 and 2008 including hand-collected data about each exit process to draw up a detailed road map of...

This paper analyzes the roles of corporate governance in bank defaults during the recent financial crisis. We investigate the impacts of bank ownership and management structures on the probability of default of US commercial banks. Our results suggest that defaults are strongly influenced by a...

This paper investigates the relationship between the two major sources of bank default risk: liquidity risk and credit risk. We use a sample of virtually all U.S. commercial banks during the period 1998 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between these two risk sources on the bank...