Soccer clubs listed on the London Stock Exchange provide a unique way of testing stock price reactions to different types of news. For each firm, two pieces of information are released on a weekly basis: experts' expectations about game outcomes through the betting odds, and the game outcomes...

We investigate the impact of corporate governance and product market competition on productivity of German and U.K. firms. We find a strong positive relation between productivity and product market competition and various governance mechanisms. In poorly performing U.K. firms, the presence of...

The first striking feature is that ownership of the average UK company is diffuse: a coalition of at least eight shareholders is required to reach an absolute majority of voting rights. Even though the average firm has a dispersed ownership, the reader should bear in mind that there are about...

The markets for management buyouts in the U.K. and continental Europe have experienced dramatic growth in the past ten years. In the U.K., buyouts accounted for half of the total M&A activity (measured by value) in 2005. And as in the U.S. during the'80s, the greatest number of U.K. buyouts in...

In the UK, the top executive remuneration policy is not geared towards the creation of value but compensation revisions are rather driven by changes in corporate size, measured by sales growth. This suggests that managing larger firms requires special managerial skills. Even in UK companies with...