This paper looks at shareholder activism from the perspective of the revision of the EU Shareholder Rights Directive, which was approved by the European Parliament on 14 March 2017. The main findings are as follows.First, the effective engagement of institutional investors in corporate...

This paper examines the relation between firm ownership structure, bilateral political relations and firm performance using a sample of 219 cross-border mergers conducted by Chinese listed companies from 2000 to 2013. First, we find that government-affiliated bidder abnormal returns do not...

How does bank integration affect the market for corporate control for nonfinancial firms? We provide causal evidence that interstate bank deregulation affects acquisitions mainly through reducing the information asymmetry between acquirers and targets, instead of increased credit supply. After...

In this contribution, at first, we introduce a basic network framework to study pyramidal structures and wedges between ownership and control of companies. Then, we apply it to a dataset of 53.5 million of companies operating in 208 countries. Among others, we detect a strong concentration of...

Acquisitions by emerging market firms of targets located in developed markets have increased drastically over the recent years. We use this setting to test Coffee's (1999) bonding hypothesis in a cross-border M&A context by examining whether acquirers adopt the corporate governance practices...

I show that nonroutine premerger trades by acquirer outside directors contain a significant amount of private information and indicate opportunistic trading on the information. I find that outside directors sell shares before less valuable deals and purchase shares before more value enhancing...

This article provides new evidence on the important role of institutional investors in affecting corporate strategy. Institutional cross-ownership between two firms not only increases the probability of them merging, but also affects the outcomes of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Institutional...