As institutional investors are the largest shareholders in most listed UK firms, one expects them to monitor the firms they invest in. However, there is mounting empirical evidence which suggests that they do not perform any monitoring. This paper provides a new test on whether UK institutional...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases).In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

This paper investigates whether investment spending of firms is sensitive to the availability of internal funds.Imperfect capital markets create a hierarchy for the different sources of funds such that investment and financial decisions are not independent.The relation between corporate...

This study investigates how profit redistribution affects the performance of firms affiliated to business groups.It shows that inefficient profit redistribution causes group-affiliated firms to perform poorly relative to independent firms.This underperformance persists even after controlling for...

We develop a theory and empirical test of how the legal system affects the relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. The theory uses a double moral hazard framework to show how optimal contracts and investor actions depend on the quality of the legal system. The empirical...

This paper contributes to the comparative corporate governance literature by showing how cross-country differences in governance and legal standards affect the bondholder wealth effects of European merger and acquisitions (M&As).Using investment-grade Eurobonds, we find some remarkable...

In this study we investigate the role of leverage in disciplining overinvestment problems.We measure the relationships between leverage, Tobin s q and corporate governance characteristics for Dutch listed firms.Besides, our empirical analysis tests for determinants of leverage from tax and...

Does better corporate governance unambiguously improve the risk/return efficiency of banks? Or does either a re-orientation of banks' revenue mix towards more opaque products, an economic downturn, or tighter supervision create off-setting or reinforcing effects? The authors relate bank...