We measure the impact of negative environmental, social and governance news on corporate bond prices and credit default swap premiums for the Eurozone market. Each firm is affected at least by one piece of news related to its environmental, social and governance practices. Each news is then...

Investors and academics increasingly criticize that features of employee stock option (ESO) programs reflect rent-extraction by managers (managerial power view). We use a unique European data set to investigate the relationship between the design of ESO programs and corporate governance...

We study whether the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 made firms less opaque. For identification, we use a difference-in-differences estimation approach and compare EU firms that are cross-listed in the US—and therefore subject to SOX—with comparable EU firms that are not cross-listed. We...

We study the role of private equity firms in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. We find that private equity-owned firms are more likely to become targets in crossborderM&A transactions. This effect is particularly strong in transactions where the target or its shareholders actively reach out...

After publication of the Baker/Wurgler study (2002) the Market Timing theory has established itself as an alternative capital structure theory. It implies that the capital market structure of an enterprise represents the accumulated result of Equity Market Timing attempts. Within the framework...

We analyze proprietary internal capital allocation data from a large retail banking group consisting of member banks and a headquarters organization. We find that capital allocations from headquarters compensate for deposit shortfalls on the bank level, suggesting that the headquarters offers...

Does more bargaining power of managers inside a firm lead to larger allocations of capital? To tackle this question, we use unique and proprietary panel data on planned and realized capital allocations inside a very large conglomerate. The firm operates worldwide, is headquartered in Europe and...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">Abstract</heading>We use unique case study data to analyze the behavior of top managers in an executive stock option plan. We gather questionnaire data on the managers' traits and combine it with exercise data. Managers in our sample expect low volatilities (compared to historical estimates) and are well...

Stock option programs constitute an important economic domain both for the issuing companies and for their employees. Little is known, however, about which individual variables actually drive exercise patterns and how employees value their stock options. We study the following set of research...