This study surveys the academic and professional literature examining the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with a focus on empirical studies. Privatisation has been instrumental in reducing state ownership in many countries and had a transforming effect on global stock markets,...

This study surveys the academic and professional literature examining the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with a focus on empirical studies. Privatisation has been instrumental in reducing state ownership in many countries and had a transforming effect on global stock markets,...

Motivated by the recent rise of state capitalism, this paper investigates the effects of government ownership on market valuations across a sample of publicly listed corporations from East Asia. We find strong, robust evidence that government-owned firms exhibit higher market valuation than...

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 to...

We investigate the relation between state ownership and corporate investment. In a matched panel of 624 European firms, state ownership curtails firms' responsiveness to investment opportunities. With increasing government ownership, investment becomes more sensitive to internal funds when...

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,...

We investigate the effect of government share ownership on the cost of corporate debt. Government ownership could carry an implicit debt guarantee reducing the chance of default and leading to a lower cost of debt. On the other hand, government ownership could lead to a higher cost of debt if...

This study presents the first comprehensive compilation of the number of people around the world who own shares directly and indirectly. We document that at least 310 million people in 59 countries (24 developed and 35 emerging market nations) own stock directly [Table 1]. Nearly 173 million of...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 1993 to 2007. We find that the level of cash holdings declines as state ownership increases. This negative relation is attributable to the soft-budget constraint (SBC) inherent in state...