This second edition of this publication provides an overview of important contemporary issues relating to foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational enterprises for all those who are interested in this subject, but are not always in a position to follow diverse perspectives and what is...

In April 2012, Delta Air Lines (Delta) purchased a mothballed oil refinery. We use this case to illustrate when, how, and why vertical integration can hedge input price risk. First, we show that stockholders and creditors expected the move to create wealth. Consistent with their predictions,...

The results of our empirical investigation indicate that, on average, corporate governance features in the 80 largest oil and gas companies around the world have changed considerably in the wake of the landmark case of Enron and the 2008 global financial crisis. Both listed non-U.S. firms and...

Defined as a single industrial sector, the global production, distribution and consumption of energy is the world’s largest in terms of annual capital investment (US$1.83 trillion in 2019) and the second largest nonfinancial industry in terms of sales revenue ($4.51 trillion). Over 100 million...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to economic and health crises (“twin crises”) worldwide. Using a sample of firms from 74 countries over the period January to August 2020, we examine stock price reactions of multinational corporations (MNCs) and purely domestic companies (DCs) to the crisis. We...

Frequently the largest equity offerings in the world, share-issue privatizations (SIPs) are sometimes conducted entirely on domestic exchanges and are sometimes cross-listed on foreign exchanges. In this paper, we examine the determinants of a privatizing government's actions regarding whether...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 1993 to 2007. We find that the level of cash holdings declines as state ownership increases. This negative relation is attributable to the soft-budget constraint (SBC) inherent in state...

This article details major privatization deals executed during 2010 and the first half of 2011 and surveys trends shaping the privatization landscape worldwide. We document several important facts, including the following: (1) Governments raised a record $213.6 billion (€159.9 billion) through...

What a year 2009 was for privatization worldwide! One year after witnessing massive injections of government capital into financial systems, 2009 saw a record volume of state sales of corporate equity - or, stated more accurately, a record volume of corporate repurchases of government-owned...