We examine 802 investments by 33 Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in publicly traded companies between May 1985 and November 2009, and find that SWFs tend to invest in large, levered, profitable growth firms, usually headquartered in an OECD country. Announcements of SWF investments yield...

During 2005-2006, the Chinese government implemented a reform aimed at eliminating the so-called non-tradable shares (NTS), shares typically held by the State or by politically connected institutional investors that were issued at the early stage of financial market development. Our analysis,...

We construct a comprehensive panel data of 96 publicly traded European utilities over the period 1994-2005 in order to study the relationship between the capital structure of regulated firms, regulated prices, and investments, and examine if and how this interaction is affected by ownership...

This paper reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of public ownership and control. We argue that the transfer of operational control over productive assets to the private sector represents the most desirable governance, due to the inherent difficulty for citizens to constrain...

Privatization has certainly been one of the main events of the economic and financial history of the 20th century. Between 1997 and 2004 more than 4,000 privatization operations were carried out in the world, bringing to governments revenues for over 1,350US$billion. Western Europe emerges as...

Nontradable shares (NTS) are an unparalleled feature of the ownership structure of Chinese listed companies and represented a major hurdle to domestic financial market development. After some failed attempts, in 2005 the Chinese authorities have launched a structural reform program aiming at...

This report provides an overview of the causes and consequences of the Italian State-owned Enterprises (SOE) reform process. Particularly, it analyzes the symbiotic link between share issue privatization (SIP), i.e. privatization in public equity markets, and financial market development, and...

Seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) executed through accelerated underwritings have increased global market share recently, raising over $850 billion since 1998, and now account for over half (two-thirds) of the value of U.S. (European) SEOs. We examine 31,242 global SEOs, executed during...

Privatisation, i.e. the transfer of ownership and control of state-owned enterprises, is a worldwide phenomenon. Which political, economic and institutional factors are shaping this process? This paper addresses the issue presenting new evidence from a sample of 49 countries. From an empirical...