In contrast to the popular assumption of independence made in the classic corporate finance literature, many companies around the world are linked through common ownership to form business groups. This paper reviews the growing literature on the consequences of business group membership. The...

In contrast to the popular assumption of independence made in the classic corporate finance literature, many companies around the world are linked through common ownership to form business groups. This paper reviews the growing literature on the consequences of business group membership. The...

In contrast to the popular assumption of independence made in the classic corporate finance literature, many companies around the world are linked through common ownership to form business groups. This paper reviews the growing literature on the consequences of business group membership. The...

Recent empirical research has stressed the importance of economy wide factors in the assessment of default risk, for instance for bond portfolios or portfolios of bank loans. Macroeconomic risk is essentially systematic, as it is difficult to reduce through diversification. Adequate forecasts of...

The bankruptcy prediction literature generally ignores corporate ownership and assumes companies are independent economic entities. In Continental Europe this latter assumption does not hold, due to the importance of business groups. Using a sample of mostly non-quoted Belgian medium and large...

Most models in the bankruptcy prediction literature implicitly assume companies are stand-alone entities. However, in view of the importance of business groups in Continental Europe, ignoring group ties may have a negative impact on predictive reliability. We find that models encompassing both...

The literature on capital structure dynamics assumes that companies trade-off the advantages of a leverage adjustment and its costs. In general, private companies are assumed to face relatively large adjustment costs, and should have lower financing flexibility. However, we argue that an...

Because of low success rates, several European countries have recently reformed their US Chapter 11-type bankruptcy procedures or are planning future reforms. Using unique data from a survey among judges and insolvency practitioners (receivers), we explore the ex ante expectations of the impact...

This study examines the cash policies of business group members (i.e., affiliates). Using a panel dataset of private Belgian affiliates and comparable non-affiliated firms, the empirical results show that business group affiliates hold significantly smaller amounts of cash as compared to...

Separation between operational responsibilities and those of oversight is an important point of discussion in governance. Novel to the literature, this paper not only offers direct evidence on the degree of separation, but also shows its relationship with size (ceteris paribus efficiency...