This paper analyses the German corporate law reform's effect on the publicly listed companies' ownership and performance. First, theoretically plausible implications of the most important laws that were issued 1990-2009 are provided, then an empirical analysis using 1997-2008 panel data...

We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and activist institutional...

After the governance crisis of 2001-2003 and the regulatory response through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the European corporate governance codes, the financial crisis has revealed persistent governance problems in financial institutions relating to executives, non-executives and shareholders. For...

Using 2,956 CEO turnovers from 1993 to 2009, I find that default probability is useful in understanding and predicting forced CEO turnovers for non-distressed firms, controlling for conventional performance measures, such as stock performance. The high predictive power is not explained by...

Modern perceptions of good corporate governance assume that the general meeting has a meaningful role in the governance of listed companies and that shareholders make responsible use of their voting rights. Assessments after the financial crisis, however, indicate that institutional investors by...

This paper examines the market's reaction to news of corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by Japanese bidders during the 1990s. Domestic versus global bids and pro-M&A legislation are considered as determinants of bidders' abnormal returns. The results show that bidders for domestic targets...

This paper examines minority squeeze-outs and their regulation in Germany, a country where majority shareholders have extensively used this tool since its introduction in 2002. Using unique data on court rulings and compensations, we analyze a sample of 324 squeeze-outs of publicly listed...

This paper analyzes how announce changes in the corporate control (takeover) of Endesa, Hidrocantábrico and Scottish Power affect their stock market returns and the impact that these events have on the stock market returns of competitors of the target firm. Using an “event study”...