Does state ownership breed risk-taking behavior in commercial banks? This paper examines this issue using a panel of Chinese banks. We find that state-ownership is in general associated with higher risks. In addition, we find that banks controlled by the central government have the highest...

This paper examines the recent upsurge in foreign acquisitions of U.S. firms, specifically focusing on acquisitions made by firms located in emerging markets. Neoclassical theory predicts that, on net, capital should flow from countries that are capital-abundant to countries that are...

We investigate the effect of line-of-business diversification on asset risk-taking in the U.S. property-liability industry. The coordinated risk management hypothesis (Schrand and Unal, 1998) implies a negative relation between underwriting risk and investment risk. Consistent with this...

We investigate the relationship between product diversification and performance in the Dutch property-liability (P&L) insurance industry for the period 2007-2018. We employ a two-step approach: we first investigate the drivers of diversification and, as a second step, we investigate the impact...

This study examines the relation between bank equity ownership and corporate hedging in Japan, an economy where banks are allowed, to a certain limit, to hold shares of firms to which they lend funds. The results show that bank equity ownership is positively related to the corporate usage of...

This study investigates the relationship between dividends and ownership structure for a panel of 330 large quoted UK firms. Controlling for unobserved firm-specific effects, results indicate a negative relationship between dividends and ownership concentration. Ownership composition also...

We investigate the impact of domestic and international bank-insurance deals on the risk-return profiles of bidding banks, peer banks and peer insurers within a GARCH framework. We find that both announcing and non-announcing firms experience positive abnormal returns with the effect on insurer...

The paper examines efficiency and productivity of US property-liability (P-L) insurers using data envelopment analysis (DEA). We estimate pure technical, scale, cost, revenue and profit efficiency over the period 1993-2011. Insurers' adjacent year total factor productivity changes and their...

We examine the long run performance of Mamp;A transactions in the property-liability insurance industry. We specifically investigate whether such transactions create value for the bidders' shareholders and assess how corporate governance mechanisms affect such performance. Our results show that...

This study examines changes in block ownership for a large sample of listed and non-listed German firms. The frequency of block trading is similar to other countries, and the vast majority of block trades leads to changes in ultimate ownership (control transfers). Such changes are more likely...