A strategically minded CFO will realize that strategic corporate risk management is about finding the right balance between risk prevention and proactive value generation. Efficient risk and performance management requires adequate assessment of risk and risk exposures on the one hand and...

The founding directors of newly incorporated companies bring social capital (reputation, networks, business relationships) and human capital (task-related, professional and director experience) to a new venture and founding boards vary in degree of heterogeneity (size, diversity, turnover). This...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the combined effect of both internal and external mechanisms on the performance of thirty European banks. This research uses a technique of panel data over the period 2004 to 2009. The results show that banks conduct trade-offs between different governance...

Rating affects corporate credit costs and leverage choices. Therefore, we develop a corporate valuation model where the choice of leverage is consistent with the implied cost of debt of the rating class. We explicitly model the trigger, the consequences, and the analytical probability of...

The purpose of this paper is to find out if firms that operate with debt free balance sheet are rewarded more by the investors at large. For this we form portfolios of debt free firms and compare their performance with performance of matching portfolios of leveraged firms from the same industry...

We analyze how firms strategically renegotiate labor contracts to extract concessions from labor. While anecdotal evidence suggests that firms tend to renegotiate down wages in times of financial distress, there is no empirical evidence that documents such renegotiation, its determinants, and...

The importance of brand value of a firm is multifold. It increases customers and product market success, which in turn plays positively for the value maximization principle of a firm. Previous literature using advertisement expenses tried to connect the finance-marketing interface for arguing...

We empirically test whether banks' ownership network affects the relationship between product diversification and performance for a sample of European commercial banks. We measure banks' ownership network by the distance between the bank and its largest ultimate owner in pyramids. This measure...

The banking sector around the world has undergone significant changes in its environment, resulting on its performance on significant impact. The bank plays an important role in the economy because of the function play by the bank as a financial intermediary linking both units of surplus and...

Detractors have warned that Private Equity (PE) funds tend to over-lever their portfolio companies because of an option-like payoff, building up default risk and debt overhang. This paper argues PE-ownership leads to substantially higher levels of optimal (value-maximizing) leverage, by reducing...