This paper examines how legal risk, defined as the strength of creditor rights and legal enforcement, affects debt ownership concentration in the project finance loan market. Using a sample of 495 project finance loan tranches from 61 countries, worth $151 billion, we document high levels of...

While the U.S. still accounts for about two-thirds of the world's total private equity fund-raising and investment, other countries have been adopting American practices and are experiencing significant growth in their private equity markets. In fact, a case can be made that a global market for...

We examine cash dividends and share repurchases from 1989 to 2005 in the 15 nations that were members of the European Union before May 2004. As in the United States, the fraction of European firms paying dividends declines, while total real dividends paid increase and share repurchases surge. We...

This study surveys the academic and professional literature examining the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with a focus on empirical studies. Privatisation has been instrumental in reducing state ownership in many countries and had a transforming effect on global stock markets,...

Our study extends on conventional measures of contagion by directly investigating changes in the existence and the directions of causality. In particular, we apply a Granger-causality methodology on sovereign bond spreads as a measure of perceived country risk. For the Asian crisis, we find...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China’s share-issue privatized firms from 2000 to 2012. We find that the level of cash holdings increases as state ownership declines. For the average firm in our sample, a 10 percentage-point decline in state ownership leads...