This paper analyzes the efficiency and distributional consequences of the largest out- of-court restructuring ever ($20 billion of debt). The restructuring was engineered by a five-bank committee composed of the largest creditors, which took effective control of the company at the onset of...

DuPont, one of the most respectable U.S. companies, caused environmental damage that ended up costing the company around a billion dollars. By using internal company documents disclosed in trials we rule out the possibilities that this bad outcome was due to ignorance, an unexpected realization,...

We try to explain why Italy's labor productivity stopped growing in the mid-1990s. We find no evidence that this slowdown is due to trade dynamics, Italy's inefficient governmental apparatus, or excessively protective labor regulations. By contrast, the data suggest that Italy's slowdown was...

We study how political factors shape competition in the mobile telecommunication sector. We show that the way a government designs the rules of the game has an impact on concentration, competition, and prices. Pro-competition regulation reduces prices, but does not hurt quality of services or...

In this paper we discuss the role of the media in pressuring corporate managers and directors to behave in ways that are 'socially acceptable'. Sometimes this coincides with shareholders' value maximization, others not. We provide both anecdotal and systematic evidence that media affect...

We construct a measure of the private benefits of control in 39 countries based on 412 control transactions between 1990 and 2000. We find that the value of control ranges between 4% and +65%, with an average of 14 percent. As predicted by theory, in countries where private benefits of control...

We study the effect of media coverage on corporate governance by focusing on Russia in the period 1999-2002. This setting offers us three ideal conditions for such a study: plenty of corporate governance violations, no alternative mechanisms to address them, and the presence of an investment...

This paper explains why companies close to bankruptcy tend to lose their best workers and why the employees who remain lack proper motivation. This collapse of incentives within an organization arises because of a negative interaction between the system of incentives and the capital structure...

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...

We argue that profit-maximizing media help overcome the problem of quot;rational ignorancequot; highlighted by Downs (1957) and in so doing make elected representatives more sensitive to the interests of general voters. By collecting news and combining it with entertainment, media are able to...