This study deals with the financial structures and the performances of small and medium-sized (SMEs) versus Large enterprises (LEs) using BACH data bank which is the most advanced available data base for comparison in this field. It covers the period 1990-1996 and concerns 9 countries (7...

What is the value of political capital for individuals? Towards the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, military and civilian collaborators entered the business elite, controlling the largest and most important firms in the country. Using a novel panel dataset of board members in these...

Two well-known mechanisms for enhancing managers' accountability are yardstick competition and internal monitoring. Yardstick competition puts managers in direct competition when firms make decisions for re-appointment (Tirole, 2006). Monitoring is used by firms to detect managers' rent-seeking...

Limited liability is considered a “birthright” of corporations. The concept is entrenched in legal theory, and it is a fixed reality of the political economy. But it remains controversial. Scholarly debate has been engaged in absolute terms of defending the rule or advocating its abrogation....

Two defining elements of the “global network economy” are the evolution of global flagship networks (GFNs) and the increasing use of digital information systems (DIS) to manage these networks. Both transformations may gradually reduce constraints to cross-border knowledge diffusion, and...

We use new firm-level data from Chile to document resource misallocation in favor of politically connected firms during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. We find that firms with links to the Pinochet regime (1973–1990) were relatively unproductive and benefited from resource...

We show that the sale of state owned firms in dictatorships can help political corporations to emerge and persist over time. Using new data, we characterize Pinochet's privatizations in Chile and find that some firms were sold underpriced to politically connected buyers. These newly private...