In this paper, I investigate whether being part of a business group mitigated the effects of the global financial crisis for Swedish firms. The crisis is used as an exogenous shock to firms' external financing. The investments made by business group firms are compared to those made by standalone...

In this paper we investigate the impact of institutional ownership on UK mergers and acquisitions. We employ a comprehensive sample of M&As conducted by UK acquirers from 2000 to 2010, thus including a full cycle of peak and trough in M&A waves. We find that institutional investors increase the...

This paper seeks to explain how failures in corporate governance contributed to the global financial crisis. More precisely, it studies how the current corporate governance systems failed to safeguard against aggressive risk taking and to provide the control that companies need in order to...

Firms are increasingly resorting to private placements in recent years, yet there is no published study of emerging markets. There is a unique opportunity to study this behavior during a severe financial crisis, when firms resorted to private placements to recover financially distressed firms....

We find that Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that performed poorly before the global financial crisis performed better during the crisis, especially when they relied on bank debt. This suggests that state ownership mitigates financial constraints during times of financial crisis. Large...

Combating managerial opportunism is a difficult task. Managers do not tend to sit idle when facing a regulatory attempt to restrict their activities. They often seek ways to circumvent the regulation or new, alternative avenues for enriching themselves. This Article uncovers one recent and...

Usual measures of the risk-taking incentives of bank CEOs do not capture the risk-shifting incentives that the exposure of a CEO's wealth to his firm's stock price (delta) creates in highly levered firms. We find evidence consistent with the importance of these incentives for bank CEOs: In a...

We discuss the literature on the shift from stakeholder to shareholder finance behind the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Traditional banks generally maximized stakeholder value (STV). But before the GFC also many of them started maximizing shareholder value (SHV). Moving from STV to SHV often...

When forming an investment portfolio there are two effects influencing its not systematic risk. And if the first of them – diversification – is well studied, the second – an inequality of specific risk of components of a portfolio – remained on the periphery. In works and by the...