This paper empirically analyzes the call timing of callable bonds to see how refunding opportunity, cost of financial distress, agency cost of debt, and private information affect the call decision. The empirical results show that firms issue callable bonds, convertible or not, to enjoy future...

This paper analyses corporate loan guarantees among the Korean chaebol affiliates. Loan guarantees are found to be efficiency-neutral under a set of ideal conditions characterized by perfect and symmetric information, no agency problem, and no governmental interference in private financial...

In this paper, we revisit an old issue on the relation between management ownership and firm’s value. The Korean panel data on the business group firms, allows us to compute ownership right and control right separately for each business group affiliated firm. Our measures are different from...

Beauty has been shown to be valuable in many markets and supposedly can be improved through plastic surgery. This raises the question of how effective plastic surgery is in improving a person’s beauty and economic outcomes. We find empirical evidence that while people improve their facial...

Workers who lose their jobs can become re-employed either by being recalled to their previous employers or by finding new jobs. Workers' chances for recall should influence their job search strategies, so the rates of exit from unemployment by these two routes should be directly related. We...

Demsetz and Lehn (1985), Morck, Shleifer, and Vishny (1988), and McConnell and Servaes (1990) report different empirical findings regarding ownership structure and corporate profitability. In this paper, we re-estimate the relation between management ownership and firm's value after controlling...

This paper establishes monotonicity of the chi-square test statistic. As the more efficient parameter estimator is plugged into the test statistic, the degrees of freedom of the resulting chi-square test statistic monotonically increase.

The existence of the business groups has been associated with market failure in emerging economies, and thus their performance has been argued and found to have declined with development of market institutions surrounding them. This paper takes up this issue of long-term performance of the...