Because minority shareholders can be a nuisance for a company, a majority shareholder may want to freeze them out. In general, the approach in the United States towards freeze-outs is more flexible than in the European Union. Law and economics scholarship suggests that a flexible regime for...

Do freeze-out mergers mitigate the free rider problem of corporate takeovers? We study this question in a tender offer model with finitely many shareholders. Under a freeze-out merger, shareholders expect to receive the original offer price whether or not they tender their shares. We show that...

Given restrictions placed on communication with prospective investors, retail investor attention can help firms/underwriters with the task of initially valuing an IPO. Using Google search volume to proxy for retail investor attention, we find that the presence of and an increase in retail...

We address one of the cardinal puzzles of European corporate law: the lack of derivate shareholder suits. We explain this phenomenon on the basis of percentage limits which require shareholders to hold a minimum amount of shares in order to bring a law suit. We show that, under this legal...

At a fundamental level, corporate governance mechanisms promote ethical business relationships and actions. Having the proper governance mechanisms in place is especially important to the less informed, nonprofessional class of investors who may not have the ability, power or influence to...

Is there a feasible and desirable alternative to capitalism? Challenging capitalism has been somewhat taboo for academic economists since the collapse of communism. And yet it remains a hot question, not just because nine years after the outbreak of the financial crisis, unemployment is still...

Einleitung -- Danksagung -- #1 … weil wir alle Trader sind -- #2 … weil wir Trading lieben -- #3 … weil Trading das Dilemma zwischen Konsum und Sparen löst -- #4 ... weil Trading die Rentenlücke schließt -- #5 … weil Trader Wohlstand schaffen und vermehren -- #6 ... weil Trader ihr...

Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

We address one of the cardinal puzzles of European corporate law: the lack of derivate share-holder suits. We explain this phenomenon on the basis of percentage limits which require share-holders to hold a minimum amount of shares in order to bring a lawsuit. We show that, under this legal...

We address one of the cardinal puzzles of European corporate law: the lack of derivate shareholder suits. We explain this phenomenon on the basis of percentage limits which require shareholders to hold a minimum amount of shares in order to bring a lawsuit. We show that, under this legal regime,...

We hypothesize that age similarity among small shareholders acts as an implicit coordinating device for their actions, and thus may represent an indirect source of corporate governance in firms with dispersed ownership. We test this hypothesis on a sample of Swedish firms during the 1995-2000...

Ein Buch mit einer bestrickenden Konzeption: Alle umfassenderen theoretischen Alternativen zum zeitgenössischen Kapitalismus werden hier eingehend untersucht - angefangen bei den utopischen Entwürfen in der Ideengeschichte, über Sozialismus, Anarchismus und Planwirtschaft bis hin zu...

Using an index which increases as a firm adopts more governance attributes, we find that 12.7% of foreign firms have a higher index than matching U.S. firms. The best predictor for whether a foreign firm adopts more governance attributes than a comparable U.S. firm is whether the firm comes from...