As institutional investors are the largest shareholders in most listed UK firms, one expects them to monitor the firms they invest in. However, there is mounting empirical evidence which suggests that they do not perform any monitoring. This paper provides a new test on whether UK institutional...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases).In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

This paper investigates whether investment spending of firms is sensitive to the availability of internal funds.Imperfect capital markets create a hierarchy for the different sources of funds such that investment and financial decisions are not independent.The relation between corporate...

This study investigates how profit redistribution affects the performance of firms affiliated to business groups.It shows that inefficient profit redistribution causes group-affiliated firms to perform poorly relative to independent firms.This underperformance persists even after controlling for...

This paper contributes to the comparative corporate governance literature by showing how cross-country differences in governance and legal standards affect the bondholder wealth effects of European merger and acquisitions (M&As).Using investment-grade Eurobonds, we find some remarkable...

We contrast the features of the German corporate governance system with those of other systems and discuss the recent regulatory initiatives.For example, the rules on insider trading and anti-trust have been strengthened.The Restructuring Act has been revised to prevent minority shareholders...

We examine how ownership structure affects the performance of firms using firm level data from a large emerging market, India.We specifically focus on a previously unexplored phenomenon, namely the differential role played by foreign institutional and foreign corporate shareholders.An...

This paper provides evidence on the corporate governance role of shareholderinitiated proxy proposals. Previous studies debate over whether activists use proxy proposals to discipline firms or to simply advance their self-serving agendas, and whether proxy proposals are effective at all in...

We analyze the relation between CEO compensation and networks of executive and non-executive directors for all listed UK companies over the period 1996-2007. We examine whether networks are built for reasons of information gathering or for the accumulation of managerial influence. Both indirect...

This study investigates the impact of corporate governance and product market competition on total factor productivity growth in Germany and the UK.For Germany, the prototype of a bank-based governance system, productivity grows faster in firms controlled by financial institutions (in...