This thesis examines three questions in Corporate Finance. The first chapter investigates the effect of institutional ownership on the governance dynamics and behavior of firms. I exploit the exogenous change in equity index membership generated by the reconstitution of the Russell indices. Following reconstitution, I show that firms just included in the Russell1000 index have higher institutio...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of corporate governance, the ownership percentage of major and institutional shareholders, auditor change, audit committee independence, and information asymmetry on accounting conservatism. Basu's model (1997) has been used to evaluate the relationship among variables. The present study is a post-event study, and the research sample includ...

Business groups are a prominent enterprise system in most East Asian and emerging economies. This article addresses an important but understudied issue – ownership and control of these large conglomerates. Studying the ownership structure of the top 100 Taiwanese business groups sheds light on the debate between the culturalists and the institutionalists. Culturalists claim family domination ev...

This study investigates the association between the ownership structure of a firm and the accuracy of individual one-year-ahead earnings forecasts made by UK analysts. The relationship is explored in the presence of individual analyst and firm-specific characteristics using a research-tailored dataset comprising 11,659 individual analysts’ forecasts made over the period, 1996 to 2001. To addres...

This paper conducts a crosscountry empirical study of the impact of institutions and agency conflicts on ownership reforms and their implications for changes in performance and efficiency. We examine two main questions. First, we evaluate the effects of certain property rights and institutional quality measures on performance and efficiency. We find that property rights and contracting rights p...

The paper shows that the difference in aggregate volatility risk can explain why several anomalies are stronger among the stocks with low institutional ownership (IO). Because of their desire to hedge against aggregate volatility or to exploit their competitive advantage in obtaining and processing information, coupled with the dislike of uncertainty and volatility, institutions tend to stay aw...

This paper investigates whether proximity to institutional shareholders influences corporate policies. We find that firms with high local institutional ownership are more profitable, less risky, and have a better governance structure. Specifically, these firms are less likely to engage in undesirable corporate activities such as aggressive earnings management or option back-dating and are there...