Using hand-collected data on CEO appointments during shareholder activism campaigns, this study examines whether shareholder involvement in CEO recruiting affects frictions in CEO hiring decisions. The results indicate that appointments of CEOs who are recruited with shareholder activist...

This article analyzes the impact of institutional investors on firm productivity duringthe financial crisis 2008/09 across European manufacturing industries. Using propen-sity score matching combined with a difference in differences estimator I find a positivesignificant effect of 2% of foreign...

The economic policy response to COVID-19 lockdowns included a variety of measures. Their effects on non-financial firms, however, remain unclear. To shed light on the effect of transfers, we investigate the effect of German emergency aid transfers (November-December aid), a program designed for...

We study quantity and price competition in heterogeneous triopoly markets where two firms are commonly owned by institutional shareholders, whereas the third firm is owned by independent shareholders. With such a mixed ownership structure, the common owners have an incentive to coordinate their...

Common ownership - when an investor holds shares in two or more companies - has recently attracted significant attention from policy-makers and researchers, studying mainly US firms. European firms, however, are different as top investors with large stakes, like governments, founding families...

This paper explores the effect of a firm's reputation of being a green bond issuer on its financing costs. Using a sample of 73 listed Swedish real estate companies issuing in total about 1500 bonds over the period from 2011 till 2021, differencein- difference analyses and instrumental variable...

Family firms are known for their reluctance to invest in research and development. We show that strengthened trade secret protection is associated with higher R&D investment by family firms. More specifically, we show that the association between the strength of trade secret protection through...

What impact do past experiences have on the expectation formation of banks? This article analyses the risk management of Germany's largest bank during the 1970 and 1980s. In this period, financial deregulation and globalization increased the likelihood of credit defaults and forced banks to...

The issuance of sustainability-linked loans (SLLs) has grown exponentially in recent years. Using a scoring methodology, we examine the underlying key performance indicators of a large sample of SLLs and analyze whether their design creates effective incentives for improving corporate...

We investigate how managers smooth volatility in balance sheets, using the pension accounting change IAS 19R as a shock to balance sheet volatility. This shock increases pension plans' funding transparency, which is the source of volatility, without targeting actual plan funding. We find that...