One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves, and that these waves are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We test four hypotheses that have been advanced to explain merger waves: the industry shocks, q-, overvaluation and managerial...

We analyze the impact of corporate governance institutions and ownership structures on company returns on investment by using a sample of more than 19,000 companies from 61 countries across the world. We show that the origin of a country's legal system proves to be the most important. Companies...

We use investment-cash flow regressions to show that both asymmetric-information and agency problems are more severe in Continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon countries leading to too little investment by firms with attractive investment opportunities and too much by those with poor...

This paper presents empirical evidence about the ability of event studies to capture future mergers' profitability measured by accounting data. We use a sample of large horizontal concentrations during the period 1990-2002 involving 459 firms either as merging firms or competitors, and contrast...

We investigate the gender wage gap in top corporate jobs for 2000-2004. We find that female managers receive 24.0% less in total compensation than their male colleagues. When we control for personal, firm and industry characteristics, this difference reduces to 15.9%. Controlling for...

We examine the effects of mergers on the returns to acquiring companies' shareholders for a large sample of companies from both Anglo-Saxon and non-Anglo-Saxon countries over the 1980s and 1990s. With the important exception of Japan, we find similar patterns of returns across both types of...

We estimate accelerator-cash flow models for 25,000 firms in 15 transition economies over the period 1993-2003, and find that (1) investment-cash flow sensitivities decline over transition years, which we attribute to a decreasing of asymmetric information and managerial discretion as capital...