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,...

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...

We examine 802 investments by 33 Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in publicly traded companies between May 1985 and November 2009, and find that SWFs tend to invest in large, levered, profitable growth firms, usually headquartered in an OECD country. Announcements of SWF investments yield...

This study describes the newly created Monitor-FEEM Sovereign Wealth Fund Database and discusses the investment patterns and performance of 1,216 individual investments, worth over $357 billion, made by 35 sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) between January 1986 and September 2008. Approximately half...

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,...

Clustering of IPO underwriting spreads at 7% poses two important puzzles: Is the market for U.S. equity underwriting services anti-competitive and why do equity underwriters invest in reputation-building? This study resolves both puzzles. Modeling endogeneity of firm-underwriter choice using a...

We examine 802 investments by 33 Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in publicly traded companies between May 1985 and November 2009, and find that SWFs tend to invest in large, levered, profitable growth firms, usually headquartered in an OECD country. Announcements of SWF investments yield...

This study adds to the empirical evidence that privatization improves the performance of divested firms and offers preliminary evidence as to why these performance improvements occur. Using a sample of 129 share-issue privatizations from 23 developed (OECD) countries, we first document...