Magna International, Inc., a Canadian-based automotive parts manufacturer, is considering whether and how to unwind its dual-class ownership structure. A family trust controlled by the founder owns a 0.65% economic interest in the company but has 66% of the votes via a super-voting class of...

This paper examines the relation between a borrowing firm's ownership structure and its choice of debt source using a novel, hand-collected data set on corporate ownership, control and debt structures for 9,831 firms in 20 countries from 2001 to 2010. We find that the divergence between control...

This paper examines the relation between corporate ownership structure and bank loan syndicate structure. We find that the divergence between control rights and cash-flow rights of a borrowing firm's largest ultimate owner has a significant impact on the concentration and composition of the...

This article investigates how the job histories of CEOs influence their capital allocation decisions when they preside over multidivisional firms. I find that, after CEO turnover, divisions not previously affiliated with the new CEO receive significantly more capital expenditures than divisions...

This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characteristics affect people's desire to work together. Second, given the influence of these personal characteristics, we analyze whether this attraction enhances or detracts from...

We investigate how personal characteristics affect people's desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are more likely to syndicate with...

Government ownership of financial intermediaries is pervasive around the world. In this study, we examine the impact of the common government ownership between the brokerage and listed firms on the information production role of brokerage firms. We show that affiliated analysts issue more...

Different from the commonly envisioned benefit of digital payment in reducing corruption, we show, in a difference-in-differences analysis of mobile payment adoption in 198 jurisdictions, that mobile payment adoption increases corruption in the short run (up to three years from the adoption),...

How to protect public investors from expropriation by controlling shareholders in firms with concentrated ownership structures continues to be a challenge for many markets including the U.S. In this paper, we examine the effect of having a token minority activist shareholder on improving...

This article examines the impact of the divergence between corporate insiders' control rights and cash-flow rights on firms' external finance constraints via generalized method of moments estimation of an investment Euler equation. Using a large sample of U.S. firms during the 1994–2002...