De 1994 a 1999, les entreprises americaines ont massivement rachete leurs actions. Nous montrons que ce comportement est bizarre: les actionnaires anciens ne devraient normalement pas accepter de vendre leurs actions lorsque de la dette est emise pour financer les rachats, et ce refus devrait...

This Paper argues that shareholder activism can be considered as similar to the adoption of increasing returns-to-scale technology by financial institutions. I start from this mechanism to build a model designed to assess the long-run consequences of shareholder pressure. I then use this model...

This paper presents a model of the financial structure of private equity firms. In the model, the general partner of the firm encounters a sequence of deals over time where the exact quality of each deal cannot be credibly communicated to investors. We show that the optimal financing arrangement...

Any factor that makes acquisition more appealing should increase the number of acquisition that occur. This idea has been captured in standard static models in the literature. However, an increase in the number of acquisitions today means fewer firms exist to perform acquisitions in the future....

Upstream producers that possess market power, sell forwards with a lengthy duration to regional electricity companies (REC). As part of the liberalization of the electricity market, RECs have been privatized and exposed to a possible bankruptcy threat if spot prices have fallen below their...

Private equity companies have become a major force in the economic landscape. Financial- and operational-engineering are innovative characteristics of this emerging method of finance. The existing empirical data provide strong evidence that private equity activity contribute positively to the...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

More than a decade has now gone by since the crises of Banco di Napoli, Banco di Sicilia, Sicilcassa and the majors southern “Casse di Risparmio” have actually decreed the vanishing of an independent banking system in southern regions, but the economic and political debate on the effects of...

How do new and foreign firms achieve superior productivity? Do they conduct more and better R&D? Or do they distinguish themselves through computerization and organizational capital? We investigate the determinants of and returns to several types of investment, using a panel of over 40,000...

This paper analyses the effects of board composition on the behaviour and performance of a sample of 114 Italian local public utilities, for which information about 1630 directors during 1994-2004 has been collected. This period is particularly interesting because of the legal changes that...