This study examines executive compensation using data from two nationally representative samples of privately held U.S. corporations conducted ten years apart—in 1993 and 2003—and uses these data to test a number of hypotheses. We find that: (i) the level of executive pay at privately held...

Numerous studies have been conducted to test the two major competing theories of capital structure (Trade-Off Theory and Pecking-Order Theory), yet none of these studies has analyzed the capital-structure decisions of small, privately held U.S. firms, which constitute the vast majority of all...

In this study, we use data from the SSBFs to provide new information about the use of credit by small businesses in the U.S. More specifically, we first analyze firms that do and do not use credit; and then analyze why some firms use trade credit while others use bank credit. We find that one in...

We examine changes in market values and accounting returns for a sample of publicly traded Chinese firms around announcements of large block-share transfers among government agencies (“State Bureaucrats”), market-oriented State-owned enterprises (“MOSOEs”) and private investors...

In this study, we test whether bankers make more loans when they enjoy superior creditor protection. We test these hypotheses using bank-level data from 35 developed countries and 113 developing countries over the period 2000-2006 and using a random-effects model that controls for bank...

This study examines executive compensation using data from two nationally representative samples of privately held U.S. corporations conducted ten years apart—in 1993 and 2003—and uses these data to test a number of hypotheses. We find that: (i) the level of executive pay at privately held...

We examine the wealth effects of three regulatory changes designed to improve minority-shareholder protection in the Chinese stock markets. Using the value of a firm’s related-party transactions as an inverse proxy for the quality of corporate governance, we find that firms with weaker...

Previous research has established (i) that a country’s financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking...

In this study, we analyze the firm’s choice of legal form of organization (“LFO”). We find that only about one in three firms begins operations as a proprietorship, while almost as many begin as limited-liability companies and as corporations. Moreover, this distribution is remarkably...

Numerous papers in the “law and finance” literature have established that countries with better functioning legal institutions enjoy better developed capital markets, and that legal origin is a fundamental determinant of legal institutions (La Porta et al. 1997, 1998, 2006; Djankov et al. 2007)....