The objective of this report is to assess the current state of the UK environment for financing scale-up companies (‘scale-ups’), and to identify key recommendations for policy makers, industry leaders and the investment community. While the UK has experienced strong growth in start-up...

In private equity, General Partners (GPs) receive fee payments from companies whose boards they control. Fees amount to $20 billion evenly distributed over time, representing over 6% of equity invested by GPs. They do not vary with business cycles, company characteristics, or GP performance....

In the United States, on April 1, 2014, the set of rules commonly known as the Volcker Rule, prohibiting proprietary trading activities in banks, became effective. The implementation of this rule took more than three years, as proprietary trading is an inherently vague concept, overlapping...

This paper analyzes capital market reactions to international bank M&A. We investigate the combined stock return patterns of targets, bidders, and their peers upon takeover announcement, and closing or withdrawal. We distinguish five common M&A hypotheses and relate characteristic and mutually...

This paper analyzes the influence a bank’s corporate governance structure has on its risk taking. To do so, the paper specifically looks at illiquidity and insolvency risk, as measured by a bank’s liquidity creation and its margin between interest income from loans and interest expenses on...

This paper analyzes the degree and type of private equity firm activism in portfolio companies. Using hand-collected data on 211 private equity investments over the period 1997-2009, we are able to distinguish between different kinds of activism of private equity firms such as board and...

This paper compares the stability of the U.S. Dual Banking system’s two bank groups, national and state banks, in light of the global financial crisis 2007/2008. The goal of the paper is to answer three distinct questions: first, is there a difference in the (balance sheet-) fragility between...