This paper contributes to the research on corporate governance by predicting the effects of European takeover regulation. In particular, we investigate whether the recent reforms of takeover regulation in Europe are leading to a harmonization of the national legislations. With the help of 150...

Most UK IPOs include lock-in agreements, which prevent the directors and other initial shareholders from selling their shares for a specified period after the IPO. Using a sample of 94 UK IPOs, we analyse their stock performance around the time of expiry of the lock-in agreement. We also look at...

One of the typical features in Chinese listed companies is that they have a mixed ownership structure and most of them have high concentration of state shares. By undertaking a sample of all the initial public offering ('IPO') companies in 1993, this paper focuses on analyzing the level and...

The paper investigates why corporate control of listed companies is so different in Germany and the UK. For this purpose we use a unique database which allows us to trace the evolution of control in German and UK firms over the six years after their flotation. Not only do the initial...

This paper is about ownership retention in German and UK IPOs, the determinants of ownership retention and its impact on IPO long-term performance. The first part of the paper studies ownership retention by pre-IPO shareholders over a period of six years following the flotation. Second,...

To the opposite of most Continental European countries, the UK has had stringent rules on ownership disclosure for more than 50 years. However, despite this, we show that the corporate governance system in the UK still needs be improved. The way ownership of listed companies is concentrated in...

This paper investigates whether ownership concentration and different types of large shareholders can account for differences in corporate profitability. Both univariate tests and multivariate tests are applied on a sample of German and UK initial public offerings (IPOs). It is particularly...

This paper investigates the market's reaction to UK insider transactions and analyzes whether the reaction depends on the firm's ownership. There are three major findings. First, differences in regulation between the UK and US, in particular the speedier reporting of trades in the UK, may...

We study whether CEO political ideology affected how S&P 500 firms reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, an exogenous shock to demand and supply. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs are more likely to adopt shareholder-friendly than employee-friendly reactions to the pandemic. Hence, they should...

This paper explains the choice between cross-listing in the common law system versus the civil law system. We find that firms with more concentrated control, with a higher level of risk and those with more pronounced financing needs are more likely to cross-list on a common law market. In...