With more businesses going public, the certification of their value and offering price is a necessity, acting as a means of attracting investors and of enhancing further financial success. While auditors and underwriters typically certify the value of an initial public offering (IPO), venture...

We examine whether investment bank-client relationships create valuable relationship-specific capital, using stock market evidence from the period surrounding the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Specifically, we study the impact of the Lehman collapse on firms that employed Lehman for (1)...

We investigate the effect of government share ownership on the cost of corporate debt. Government ownership could carry an implicit debt guarantee reducing the chance of default and leading to a lower cost of debt. On the other hand, government ownership could lead to a higher cost of debt if...

The abnormal decline in the number of US public firms is often blamed on merger activity, private equity investments, and stock market regulations. We compare and quantify the effects of these channels on the evolution of the US listing gap in a unified framework. In the US, an extra 100 mergers...

We study the impact of government expropriation risk on the terms of cross-border syndicated loans. By comparing loans by foreign lenders from countries covered by bilateral investment treaties (BITs) to loans from non-covered countries, we isolate and quantify the impact of strengthening...

Is privatization in a country related to the stringency of its employment protection laws (EPL) – and, if so, how? We address this question using privatization deals in fourteen European countries over three decades and all the changes in EPL within a country. Using traditional...

This study summarizes the economic and political developments relating to privatization, state capitalism, and state ownership of business since 2000 and then surveys the extensive recent research examining these issues empirically. Through the early 21st century, there was an unambiguous global...

We examine the long-standing question of whether firms derive value from investment bank relationships by studying how the Lehman collapse affected industrial firms that received underwriting, advisory, analyst, and market-making services from Lehman. Equity underwriting clients experienced an...

By employing a novel, hand-collected sample of withdrawn and completed share-issue privatizations (SIPs) we show that both groups undergo comparable restructuring processes over the three years preceding the event. We employ matching procedures to explicitly control for the identified...