We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect...

Motivated by theories of the firm, which we classify as "technological" or "organizational," we analyze the determinants of firm size across industries and across countries in a sample of 15 European countries. We find that, on average, firms facing larger markets are larger. At the industry...

This Paper analyses the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system affect the extraction of private benefits by company insiders. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income insiders divert and thus worsens governance...

Firms that maintain no formal record of actions and events would hardly be considered well managed. Yet, organizations that require the recording of actions and the filing of reports are often labelled ``bureaucratic" and inefficient. We argue that the thin line between efficient management...

We study the effect of media coverage on corporate governance outcomes by focusing on Russia in the period 1999-2002. Russia provides a setting with multiple examples of corporate governance abuses, where traditional corporate governance mechanisms are ineffective, and where we can identify an...

Using a large database of private firms in Italy, we analyze the determinants of initial public offerings (IPOs) by comparing the ex ante and ex post characteristics of IPOs with those of private firms. The likelihood of an IPO is increasing in the company's size and the industry's...

We estimate private benefits of control in 39 countries using 393 controlling blocks sales. On average the value of control is 14 percent, but in some countries can be as low as -4 percent, in others as high a +65 percent. As predicted by theory, higher private benefits of control are associated...

The authors investigate the determinants of capital structure choice by analyzing the financing decisions of public firms in the major industrialized countries. At an aggregate level, firm leverage is fairly similar across the G-7 countries. The authors find that factors identified by previous...

This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship: that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, the authors ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in...

This paper focuses on the role of an initial public offering (IPO) in maximizing the proceeds an initial owner obtains in selling his company. In deciding whether to undertake an IPO, and what fraction of ownership to retain, the initial owner must balance two factors. By selling to dispersed...