Corporations in most countries are run by controlling shareholders, who have substantially smaller cash flow rights than their control rights in the firm. This separation of ownership and control allows the controlling shareholders to pursue private benefits at the cost of outside minority investors by diverting resources away from the firm and distorting corporate investment and payout policie...

One in four U.S. high-tech firms are led by CEOs with hands-on innovation experience as inventors. We show that these “Inventor CEOs” stimulate higher quality firm-level innovation, especially when they have a personal history of high-impact patents. A CEO’s technology-class specific inventor experience also predicts the technology classes in which a firm has its greatest innovation success. Ut...

This paper examines the reorganization process under Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. Our model considers two classes of creditors and accommodates several features of Chapter 11, including the intervention of the bankruptcy judge. We model the strategic interaction between claimants under Chapter 11 as a costly multiple-stage bargaining process, and solve it in a game theory setting. Us...

This paper analyzes the e ect of a possible takeover on information ows and on the terms of trade in business relationships. We consider a longterm relationship between a rm and a privately informed stakeholder, say a buyer. In our model, takeovers both increase the surplus from trade and enable the rm to extract a potentially higher share of the surplus from the buyer. The possibility of a tak...

Both theory and economic intuition suggest that newly listed firms differ from seasoned ones as potential takeover targets. We identify significant differences between the two groups of firms in this regard: (i) IPOs are more likely to be acquired than are seasoned firms, (ii) IPO targets receive higher acquisition premiums, and (iii) IPO targets are associated with greater synergy. These obser...

When expanding abroad, a multinational bank faces a trade-o¤ between accessing a foreign country via cross border lending or a …nancial foreign direct investment, i.e. green…eld or acquisition entry. We analyze the entry mode choice of multinational banks and explicitly derive the entry mode pattern in the banking industry. Moreover, we show that in less developed banking markets, a trend towar...

This paper presents a framework for quantitatively evaluating the macroeconomic effects of corporate restructuring and applies that framework to Japan. Using firmlevel financial statement data, this paper estimates total factor productivity of individual Japanese firms. Given the estimated distribution of productivity across firms, this paper simulates the effect of optimal restructuring, that ...

The magnitude of mutual funds’ business ties with their portfolio firms is documented and is linked to funds’ proxy votes at specific firms and to overall voting practices. Aggregate votes at the fund family level indicate a positive relation between business ties and the propensity to vote with management. Votes at specific firms, however, reveal that funds are no more likely to vote with mana...

New Zealand firms exhibit significant variation in the extent to which they formally involve CEOs in the executive pay-setting process: a considerable number sit on the compensation committee, while others are excluded from the board altogether. Using 1997-2005 data, we find that CEOs who sit on the compensation committee obtain generous annual pay rewards that have low sensitivity to poor perf...

The practice of executive stock option repricing is examined using a sample of firms in the gaming industry during 1994-98. The practice of repricing executive stock options is often criticized, however this paper recognizes that there may be conditions when such recontracting may be viewed as beneficial to shareholders. Specifically, given that options provide both incentives to increase risk ...