Anglo-American stock markets are much larger than their continental counterparts. Does investor protection and governance explain these differences? Using UK data, we examine four different forms of intervention which are suppose to promote good governance: takeovers, independent directors,...

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...

Die Strukturen der Unternehmensfinanzierung und -kontrolle haben sich weltweit grundlegend verändert, gekennzeichnet durch neue Kapitalmarktinstrumente, verstärktes Auftreten von Nichtbank-Finanzintermediären sowie zunehmende Arbeitsteilung zwischen den Marktteilnehmern. Der vorliegende...

This paper examines the puzzlingly high unexploited momentum returns from a new perspective. We analyze characteristics of momentum traders in a sample of 692 fund managers. We find that momentum traders are 'defined' by their short-term horizon, by a behavioural view on the market and by a...

Since 1990, most pension plans have shifted the responsibility for directing pension assets to the employee. This study summarizes some of the possible explanations for this rapid shift toward participant direction and uses IRS Form 5500 data to investigate the effect of worker and plan...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed 'hard' information about the board's...

Sie gehören zu den einflussreichsten Finanzinvestoren weltweit. Ihre Fonds verwalten Kapital in Milliardenhöhe. Sie verfügen über exzellente Kontakte zu Entscheidungsträgern in Wirtschaft und Politik. Beide haben ihren Hauptsitz in einer der bedeutendsten Finanzmetropolen, New York.Wenn die...

The near-failure on September 16, 2008, of American International Group (AIG) was an iconic moment in the financial crisis. The decision to rescue AIG was controversial at the time and remains so. Large bets on real estate pushed AIG to the brink of bankruptcy. In one case, AIG used securities...

This study examines how globalization of corporate governance practices influence the risk of European CEOs being dismissed. We argue that the harsh monitoring of the American corporate governance system spills over to the rest of the world as a result of this globalization. We focus on direct...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executives to theories based on...