Does geography matter? Firm location and corporate payout policy

We investigate the impact of geography on agency costs and firm dividend policies. We argue that remote firm location increases the cost of shareholder oversight of managerial investment decisions. We hypothesize that remotely located firms facing free cash flow problems precommit to higher dividends to mitigate agency conflicts. We find that remotely located firms pay higher dividends. As expected, the effect of geography on dividends is most pronounced for firms with severe free cash flow problems. Further, remotely located firms rely more on regular dividends instead of special dividends or share repurchases and decrease dividends less often.     

Ownership change,institutional development and performance

This paper conducts a cross-country 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 protections contribute to stronger post-privatization performance. Second, we ask whether sectors undergoing changes from state to private ownership exhibit better or worse performance than sectors remaining public. We find an insignificant effect of privatization in ordinary least squares estimates and a negative short-term effect after correcting for endogeneity of privatization decisions that disappears in the long run, consistent with recently privatized enterprises facing short-run costs of restructuring and the challenges of mitigating agency and expropriation concerns.     

Does being your bank’s neighbor matter?

This paper provides new evidence on the role of distance between banks and borrowers in bank lending. We argue that delegated monitors face higher costs of collecting information about nonlocal borrowers due to the difficulty of obtaining and verifying soft information over distances. Further, the higher information collection and monitoring costs associated with distance should be reflected in loan terms. Empirically, loan spreads are increasing in the distance between borrowers and lenders. Finally, banks are more likely to include covenant provisions or require collateral when lending to borrowers located far away.     

Ownership changes and access to external financing

This paper examines access to external financing in the privatization context and provides new evidence on the effects of financing constraints on performance and investment. Ownership reforms increase firms’ reliance on external financing. Empirically, performance and investment changes around ownership reforms are increasing in country-level measures of access to credit. The presence of a severe prior public financing constraint contributes to stronger investment growth after privatization. Privatized enterprises do not outperform publicly owned industries, all else given. Our analyses rely on new international sector- and firm-level data and correct for potential endogeneity of ownership changes.     

Product Market Competition and Shareholder Rights: International Evidence

This paper examines the interaction between product market competition and international differences in shareholder rights in relation to firm performance and corporate policies. In contrast to existing literature, we provide evidence of complementarities between product market competition and country shareholder rights protections. The benefits of shareholder rights protections for firm performance are conditional on the presence of a competitive industry environment. We find that stronger shareholder rights protections are associated with better firm performance in competitive industries. However, this relation is not significant in concentrated industries. Consistent results are obtained from the analysis of key corporate policies.     

Synergetics and the images of future

The hope of finding new methods of predicting the course of historical processes could be connected with the recent developments of the theory of self-organisation, also called synergetics. It provides us with knowledge of constructive principles of co-evolution of complex social systems, co-evolution of countries and geopolitical regions being at different stages of development, integration of the East and the West, the North and the South. Due to the growth of population on the Earth in blow-up regime, the general and local instability of development is increasing. The social world seems to go towards a unity, a sustainable commonwealth through pulsations rather than monotonously. It goes via alternation of disintegration, even if partial, and getting more powerful integrations of structures. There is a path of multiple reduction of temporal and material expenses, a path of a resonant excitation of desirable and—no less important—feasible in a given social system structure. In the case of the right topology of integration of geopolitical structures an arising whole organisation can accelerate its tempo of evolution.