We empirically study the use of value-based management systems in listed German firms and examine implications for firms' stock market performance. Using a novel, hand-collected data set covering 1,083 firm years from 2002 to 2008, we find that value-based management systems become increasingly...

This paper examines the impact of SOX on the total cost and the component cost of going public. First, we document a statistically significant increase in non-underwriting expenses of 0.8 percentage points after the introduction of SOX, which is mostly due to an increase in accounting and legal...

Building on a unique panel data set of German Prime Standard companies for the period 2005-2008, this paper investigates the influencing factors of both director compensation levels and structure, i.e. the probability of performance-based compensation. Drawing on agency theory arguments and...

This paper uses firm-level data on 162 large Hungarian enterprises to analyse the relationship betweenownership structure and corporate performance in 1998 and 1999. Cross-sectional regressions are runfor each of these years using the return on assets (ROA) as the measure of performance. Both...

We develop a continuous-time real options pricing model to study managers’incentives to cheat in the presence of equity-based compensation policies.We show that managers’ incentives to cheat are strongly influenced by theefficiency of the justice. Our model’s main result is that managers...

When information is costly, a seller may wish to prevent prospective buyers from acquiring information, for the cost of information acquisition is ultimately borne by the seller. A seller can achieve the desired prevention of information acquisition through posted-price selling, by offering...

Valuing early-stage high-technology growth-oriented companies is a challenge to current valuation methodologies. Efforts are redirected towards the design of investment contracts which materially skew the distribution of payoffs in favor of the venture investors. In effect, limitations in...

In leveraged loan deals, lead banks use bookbuilding to extract pricerelevant information from syndicate participants. This paper examines the content of such information. We find that pricing adjustments during bookbuilding are highly informative, not only about investors' required risk premium...

This paper provides new UK evidence on the relationship between managerialincentives and firm risk using a hand-collected database of 3307 executive yearobservations (698 CEO years and 2609 other executive years). We find that therelation between pay performance sensitivity and firm risk...

This paper examines the effect of using different option valuation models to calculatethe fair market value of Executive Stock Options (ESOs) granted to executivedirectors of UK firms. Our key objective is to demonstrate empirically that somecompanies will have greater incentive and benefit from...