We examine how corporate payout policy is affected by managerial stock incentives using data on more than 1100 nonfinancial firms during 1993-97. We find that management share ownership encourages higher payouts by firms with potentially the greatest agency problems—those with low market-to-book ratios and low management stock ownership. We also find that management stock options change the com...

This paper utilizes International Monetary Fund’s high quality dataset over the period from 2001 to 2004, to investigate the determinants of home bias in the international context. This paper contributes to the existing literature by using float adjusted measure of home bias for 38 countries. Information asymmetries arising due to countries’ regulatory and legal environment have significant imp...

Article history: Received 4 July 2009 Received in revised form 26 May 2012 Accepted 3 August 2012 Available online 5 October 2012 Controlling for country-level governance, we investigate how firms' corporate governance influences financing constraints. Using firm-level corporate governance rankings across 14 emerging markets, we find that better corporate governance lowers the dependence of eme...

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms’ cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models...

We empirically examine the impact of flotation costs, agency conflicts, regulation, and information asymmetries on a firm’s mix between public and private debt. Results indicate that firms with larger issue sizes exploit the scale economies in flotation costs of public debt. Firms with higher contracting costs due to moral hazard have higher proportions of private debt. There is only limited su...

This research evaluates methods used in event studies that employ accounting-based measures of operating performance. We examine the choice of an accounting-based performance measure, a statistical test, and a model of expected operating performance. We document the impact of these choices on the test statistics designed to detect abnormal operating performance. We find that commonly used resea...

The paper studies outside …nance in a model of two-dimensional moral hazard, involving risk choices as well as e¤ort choices. If the entrepreneur has insu¢ cient funds, a …rst-best outcome cannot be implemented. Second-best outcomes involve greater failure risk than …rstbest outcomes. For a Cobb-Douglas technology, second-best e¤ort and investment levels are smaller than …rst-best; for other te...

Much of the existing literature in small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) finance surveys the impact of borrower and lender characteristics on firms’ credit availability, and it has already been established that there is a positive link between the strength of firm-bank relationship and the level of credit availability. In this paper, I focus on what determines the strength of relationship, me...

This paper studies the differential impact on IPO firm listing prospectus length from increasing proportions of foreign directors from civil as opposed to common law societies and social elites. Using a unique hand-collected and comprehensive sample of 165 IPO firms from across 18 African countries the evidence suggests that increasing proportions of directors from civil code law countries is a...

We study the benefits of private entrepreneurs entering into politics in China. Using original hand-collected data on political participation of entrepreneurs that control listed firms, we document evidence of rent seeking through their political networks and several potential channels through which rent seeking is realized. It is shown that political participation results in increased stock pe...