How effective is European merger control?

This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990–2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four maintained assumptions, merger control might be interpreted to be effective if rents accruing due to the increased market power observed around the merger announcement are reversed by the antitrust decision, i.e. if there is a negative relation between announcement and decision abnormal returns. To clearly identify the events' competitive effects, we explicitly control for the market expectation about the outcome of the merger control procedure and run several robustness checks to assess the role of our maintained assumptions. We find that only outright prohibitions completely reverse the rents measured around a merger's announcement. On average, remedies seem to be only partially capable of reverting announcement abnormal returns. Yet they seem to be more effective when applied during the first rather than the second investigation phase and in subsamples where our assumptions are more likely to hold. Moreover, the European Commission appears to learn over time.     

Marginal q,Tobin's q,Cash Flow,and Investment

Many studies of the determinants of investment use Tobin's q to control for the investment opportunities of a firm. Tobin's q roughly measures the average return on a firm's capital anticipated by the market. More relevant for investment decisions, however, is the marginal return on capital. In this paper we estimate investment and research and development (R&D) equations using a measure of marginal q. We use marginal q to identify the existence of cash constraints and managerial discretion and as a separate explanatory variable. For a sample of 560 U.S. firms observed over the 1977-1996 period we present evidence confirming the existence of both cash constraints in some companies and managerial discretion in others.     

Insider ownership, ownership concentration and investment performance: An international comparison

This article makes two important contributions to the literature on the incentive effects of insider ownership. First, it presents a clean method for separating the positive wealth effect of insider ownership from the negative entrenchment effect, which can be applied to samples of companies from the US and any other country. Second, it measures the effects of insider ownership using a measure of firm performance, namely a marginal q, which ensures that the causal relationship estimated runs from ownership to performance. The article applies this method to a large sample of publicly listed firms from the Anglo-Saxon and Civil law traditions and confirms that managerial entrenchment has an unambiguous negative effect on firm performance as measured by both Tobin's (average) q and our marginal q, and that the wealth effect of insider ownership is unambiguously positive for both measures. We also test for the effects of ownership concentration for other categories of owners and find that while institutional ownership improves the performance in the USA, financial institutions have a negative impact in other Anglo-Saxon countries and in Europe.     

The deployment and penetration of high-speed fiber networks and services: Why are EU member states lagging behind?

One of the most controversial regulatory issues in Europe (and elsewhere) is whether the emerging next-generation access (NGA) infrastructure should be subjected to cost-based access regulation or whether at least a temporary removal of ex ante obligations (“regulatory holidays”) should be granted. Likewise, the role of NGA-specific state aid policies is increasingly capturing the attention of policy makers and the academic literature.     

The impact of infrastructure and service-based competition on the deployment of next generation access networks: Recent evidence from the European member states

This work identifies the most important determinants of next generation access (NGA) network deployment, using data from the EU27 member states for the years 2005–2011. Our results indicate that the more service-based competition is pronounced the more negative is the impact on NGA deployment, while competitive pressure from broadband cable and mobile affects NGA deployment in an inverted U-shaped manner. We further find that there are severe adjustment costs and stickiness towards the desired long-term level of NGA infrastructure. It appears that the approach of the European Commission to force service-based competition via cost-based access regulation will not elicit the huge new investment needed for a comprehensive NGA roll-out.     

Transparency, Integration, and the Cost of International Real Estate Investments

This paper investigates the importance of market institutions for the performance of international property investors during the 1996?C2007 period. The results show that international property companies underperform local property companies in the early years of the sample period. This underperformance is driven by the political environment, the level of economic integration, and the transparency of the real estate market in target countries. The underperformance of internationals disappears in the later years of the sample period, and so does the significance of the aforementioned factors in explaining performance differences among international companies. These findings suggest that the increased transparency of the global real estate industry has leveled the playing field for foreign property investors.     

Der Einfluss von Corporate Governance auf die Determinanten und Effekte von Investitionen

Zusammenfassung Der vorliegende Überblicksartikel kommt zu dem Schluss, dass das Corporate-Governance-Umfeld einer Firma den Zusammenhang zwischen den Investitionen (I) und Cash Flows (CF) und damit die Investitionsrenditen beeinflusst. Beide Erklärungsansätze für positive I-CF-Sensitivitäten – die Theorie der asymmetrischen Informationen (TAI) als auch die Manager-Diskretions-Theorie (MDT) – finden empirische Unterstützung in Unter-Stichproben von Firmen. Die TAI erscheint wahrscheinlicher für junge, kleine und familienkontrollierte Firmen. Enge Banken-Firmen-Beziehungen reduzieren Finanzierungsrestriktionen. Wesentliche Bestimmungsfaktoren der I-CF-Sensitivität sind auch die Rechtstradition des Landes, in der sich die Firma befindet, die Qualität des Rechnungswesens und die Eigentümerstruktur der Firma. Die empirische Evidenz über die Schätzung von Investitionsrenditen ist ebenfalls konsistent mit der Aussage, dass manche Firmen unterinvestieren (müssen), während andere überinvestieren. JEL classifications G31, G32     

Corporate Governance and Globalization

This survey gives an overview of the current state of knowledgeon the question of whether corporate-governance structures worldwideare determinants of differences in economic performance. Welook at the identities of owners, monitoring boards, and legalsystems and find that some, though not all, corporate-governancestructures give rise to differences in performance. The paperends with a tentative look at the prospects of corporate-governancestructures converging worldwide.