Purpose – This research measures information provision on the internet by private non-profit organizations (NPOs) and provides insight in underlying drivers.Design/methodology/approach – This research involves scoring websites of Belgian NPOs on the basis of their information dissemination...

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...

Due to low success rates, several European countries have recently reformed their U.S. 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 of...

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...

Recent studies of U.S. Chapter 11 show it to be a relatively efficient procedure. We examine reorganization cases in a Continental European, creditor-oriented bankruptcy system, viz. Belgium, and report very different findings. Using hazard and cure regression models to determine what drives the...

We argue that domestic business groups are able to actively optimize the internal/external debt mix across their subsidiaries. Novel to the literature, we use bi-level data (i.e. data from both individual subsidiary financial statements and consolidated group level financial statements) to model...

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...

Many Continental European countries recently reformed their bankruptcy legislations to stimulate reorganization and firm survival. We show that the Belgian 1997 bankruptcy code reform, which implemented several international best practice recommendations, significantly reduced aggregate small...