Different economies at different times use different institutional arrangements to constrain the people entrusted with allocating the economy's capital and other resources. Comparative financial histories show these corporate governance regimes to be largely stable through time, but capable of...

This paper examines the implications of corporate manager's tendency to promote her private benefits by realizing inefficient investments that incurs a cost for shareholders in terms of lost shareholder value. Under reasonable conditions, we derive an expression for such a loss and propose a...

This study decribes the typical effects of the merger process on the people involved and, using the merger between Molson Breweries and Carling O'keefe as an example, identifies the crucial role that human resource professionals must play in ensuring merger success.

This paper considers why a manager would choose to submit himself to the discipline of bank monitoring. This issue is analyzed within the context of a model where the manager enjoys private benefits, which can be restricted by the monitor, and is optimally compensated by shareholders. Within...

This Paper argues that shareholder activism can be considered as similar to the adoption of increasing returns-to-scale technology by financial institutions. I start from this mechanism to build a model designed to assess the long-run consequences of shareholder pressure. I then use this model...

This paper presents a model of the financial structure of private equity firms. In the model, the general partner of the firm encounters a sequence of deals over time where the exact quality of each deal cannot be credibly communicated to investors. We show that the optimal financing arrangement...

Any factor that makes acquisition more appealing should increase the number of acquisition that occur. This idea has been captured in standard static models in the literature. However, an increase in the number of acquisitions today means fewer firms exist to perform acquisitions in the future....

Private equity companies have become a major force in the economic landscape. Financial- and operational-engineering are innovative characteristics of this emerging method of finance. The existing empirical data provide strong evidence that private equity activity contribute positively to the...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

More than a decade has now gone by since the crises of Banco di Napoli, Banco di Sicilia, Sicilcassa and the majors southern “Casse di Risparmio” have actually decreed the vanishing of an independent banking system in southern regions, but the economic and political debate on the effects of...