We examine the relationship between ownership structure and corporate crime. Our approach draws upon two lines of research: (1) the theory of the firm which poses ownership as a critical incentive mechanism and (2) the economic theory of corporate crime, which emphasizes the role played by top management in affecting crime in the corporation. We find that crime occurs less frequently among firms in which management has a larger ownership stake. Our results imply that penalizing `corporations' (shareholders) deters crime, and that corporate crime tends not to benefit shareholders, ex ante. Rather than being something shareholders have encouraged, corporate crime appears to reflect an agency cost limited but not optimally eliminated through the costly efforts of top management. The evidence is consistent with the notion that ownership structure plays an important role in aligning the hidden actions of top management with the shareholder interest.

Golden parachutes (GPs) have attracted substantial attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. We find that GPs are associated with higher expected acquisition premiums and that this association is at least partly due to the effect of GPs on executive incentives. However, we also find that firms that adopt GPs experience negative abnormal stock returns both during and subsequent to the period surrounding their adoption. This finding raises the possibility that even though GPs facilitate some value-increasing acquisitions, they do have, on average, an overall negative effect on shareholder wealth; this effect could be due to GPs weakening the force of the market for control and thereby increasing managerial slack, and/or to GPs making it attractive for executives to go along with some value-decreasing acquisitions that do not serve shareholders' long-term interests. Our findings have significant implications for ongoing debates on GPs and suggest the need for additional work identifying the types of GPs that drive the identified correlation between GPs and reduced shareholder value.

This research contributes to the scarce but growing literature on women angel investors. More specifically, leveraging stereotype threat theory, we investigate the role played by the social environment in shaping investing behavior across genders. This study offers a comparison between female angels from a stereotype-threat–free environment and (a) male angels, and (b) female angel investors investing in a strongly male-dominated environment. Using proprietary survey data of 96 business angels, our findings confirm that the social context plays an important role in explaining female investment behavior and involvement in BA-group activities. We find that women in a female-only group do not feature investment behavior that differs significantly from men. Whereas women who invest as a minority in a male-dominated environment tend to behave differently. Investment experience, however, moderates the influence of male-dominated environments on female investment behavior. The study confirms earlier exploratory findings related to the role of stereotype threat in female business angel activity at the individual level. Contributing to stereotype threat theory and gender studies in the business angel literature, our findings suggest that the historically marginal contribution of women is a result of the social construction of their role in the finance industry, in which stereotype threats may be particularly prevalent, rather than of supposedly innate features of gender.

This paper sheds light over the operations and internal structure of business angel groups (BAGs), a leading actor inside the informal venture capital industry, due to its capability to build cognitive resources and shared competencies that are eventually provided to funded ventures alongside equity capital. We develop a framework based on the role of business angels' decision-making style, human capital and motivation as major determinants of their active involvement in the many different activities performed by angel groups, either investment related activities or group management activities. Our empirical analysis relies on a novel survey-based dataset containing qualitative and quantitative information provided by the members of two large and rather homogeneous business angel groups located in France and in Italy. Results show that business angels with a control-oriented decision-making style tend to be more actively involved in key angel group activities. Human capital built through investment experience, retirement status, as well as initial motivation to join an angel group are also significant drivers of angel involvement in several key BAG activities.