Most mergers and acquisitions involve at least four parties with competing interests — acquiring firm shareholders, acquiring firm management, target firm shareholders, and target firm management. We consider the choice between hostile and friendly takeovers in this context and offer an explanation for the prevalence of friendly mergers between large acquirers and small targets. Negotiated merg...

We study relationships between shareholder proposal activism, managerial response, and corporate social performance (CSP). We find that shareholder proposal activism reduces CSP. We infer that rather than pressuring firms to improve CSP, activism may engender diversion of resources away from CSP into political activities used by managers to resist external pressures and retain discretion. We al...

Firms that do better than their competitors in terms of satisfying customers, generate superior return at lower risk. Satisfied customers are more loyal, less sensitive to price movements. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of customer satisfaction on shareholders’ value creation. Customer satisfaction involves behavior of customers that typically relate to purchase or consumption o...

A (t, w) threshold scheme is a method for sharing a secret among w shareholders so that the collaboration of at least t shareholders is required in order to reconstruct the shared secret. This paper is concerned with the re-use of shares possessed by shareholders in threshold schemes. We propose a simple (t, w) threshold scheme based on the use of the pseudo-random function family and the unive...

The rise in private share ownership over the last decade is an interesting but relatively poorly researched issue in Australia. In the expectation that relations between large companies and their shareholders are already important and will become increasingly so, we report exploratory longitudinal studies of two aspects of the interaction. Regression analysis of shareholders’ demographic and at...

The average cash holdings of Chinese-listed firms decreased significantly after the split share structure reform in China, which specified a process that allowed previously nontradable shares held by controlling shareholders to be freely tradable on the exchanges. The reduction in cash holdings is greater for firms with weaker governance and firms facing more financial constraints prior to the ...

In a cross-border takeover, the tax base associated with future capital gains is transferred from target shareholders to acquirer shareholders. Cross-country differences in capital gains tax rates enable us to estimate the discount in the takeover price on account of future capital gains. The estimation suggests that a one percentage point increase in the capital gains tax rate reduces the valu...