We analyse the motives and market valuation of various forms of stock market delisting. We show that firms that delist voluntarily are likely to have come to the market to rebalance their leverage rather than to finance their growth opportunities. During their public life, their leverage...

Using new data for the universe of firms covered in Amadeus, we reconstruct the portfolios of shareholders who hold equity stakes in private and publicly-traded European firms. We find great heterogeneity in the degree of portfolio diversification across large shareholders. Exploiting this...

We study the evolution of the control structure of 141 privatized firms from OECD countries over the period from 1996 through 2000. We find that governments do not relinquish control after "privatization." We show that the market-to-book ratios of privatized firms converge through time to those...