We are interested in understanding how agency conflicts in private firms arise through ownership structures and family relationships. Specifically, we analyze auditors’ increase of effort and firms’ choice of auditors in situations with higher level of agency conflicts. For a large sample of...

Using an extensive panel of cross-border M&A transactions between 1990 and 2007, we find that firms from developing countries, compared with those from developed countries, bid higher on average to acquire assets in developed countries. We are interested in why these higher bids occur. We find...