We examine cash dividends and share repurchases from 1989 to 2005 in the 15 nations that were members of the European Union before May 2004. As in the United States, the fraction of European firms paying dividends declines, while total real dividends paid increase and share repurchases surge. We...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China’s share-issue privatized firms from 2000 to 2012. We find that the level of cash holdings increases as state ownership declines. For the average firm in our sample, a 10 percentage-point decline in state ownership leads...

We explore whether government ownership affects the cost of debt using a sample of fully and partially privatized companies. On average across firms, a one-percentage-point decrease in government ownership is associated with an increase in the credit spread, used as a proxy for the cost of debt,...

The Handbook of Research on IPOs provides a comprehensive review of the emerging trends and directions in the global initial public offerings (IPO) markets. The empirical evidence included in the book covers Europe, the US and the Far East, and presents a truly global perspective of IPO markets...

This study surveys the literature examining the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) We review the history of privatization, the theoretical and empirical evidence on the relative performance of state owned and privately owned firms, the types of privatization, if and by how much...