We analyse the motives and market valuation of voluntarily delisting from the London Stock Exchange. We show that firms that delist voluntarily are likely to have come to the market to rebalance their leverage rather than to finance their growth opportunities. During their quotation life, their leverage and insider ownership remained very high, they did not raise equity capital, and their profitability, growth opportunities, and trading volume declined substantially. They also generate negative pre-event and announcement date excess returns. These results hold even after controlling for agency, asymmetric information, and liquidity effects, and suggest that firms delist voluntarily when they fail to benefit from listing. Overall, these firms destroyed shareholder value and they should not have come to the market.

Using unique hand-collected data for 336 large banks across 48 countries, together with values of national culture, our empirical analysis uncovers three new robust findings. First, variations of bank risk-taking across national culture and CEO power are more pronounced when cultural values and CEO power indicators are high. Second, while the individualism dimension of national culture has a moderating influence, the uncertainty avoidance dimension has a reinforcing effect, on the relationship between CEO power and bank risk-taking. In more detail, the results for the average marginal effect of CEO power on risk for different cultural values show that CEO power has a negative (positive) or insignificant impact on bank risk-taking when the value of individualism (uncertainty avoidance) is low; however, the impact becomes positive (negative) and statistically significant as the value of individualism (uncertainty avoidance) increases. Third, intra-cultural diversity matters: ‘tight’ cultures (e.g., strong social norms) are more pronounced than ‘loose’ cultures (e.g., heterogeneous values) in influencing bank risk.