Given the governance issues arising from the separation of ownership from control, the ability to align managerial and shareholder interests via the managerial ownership of equity is an important topic of inquiry. The findings of the primarily US based literature suggest that management is aligned at low and possibly high levels of ownership but is entrenched (pursuing self interests) at intermediate ownership levels. This paper extends the US based literature in a number of important ways. First, the analysis is extended to the UK where there are important differences, as compared to the US, in the governance system. A comparative analysis of key differences between the US and UK governance systems suggest that management should become entrenched at higher levels of ownership in the UK. Some of the reasons for this suggestion are that in the UK management do not have the same freedom as their US counterparts to mount takeover defenses and institutional investors in the UK are more able to co-ordinate their monitoring activities. The empirical results of the paper confirm that UK management become entrenched at higher levels of ownership than their US counterparts. Second, the results from extending the analysis to consider different measures of firm performance and a more generalized form of the relationship confirm the general finding of the US literature of a non-linear relationship between firm performance and managerial ownership.

We study the relationship between leverage and the willingness of listed family firms to dilute control, proxied by the ownership of the main shareholder. We find that the main owner's stake positively impacts on leverage and that this impact is stronger when the business is a young family firm. Furthermore, the life cycle matters when analyzing this relationship. These results allow us to argue that owners with a greater stake prefer to raise finance via debt rather than dilute their position via equity, and that young family firms face a trade-off between their control risk aversion and the need for external financing.

This paper examines the relatively neglected link between dividend policy and institutional ownership. It is also the first example of using well-established dividend payout models to examine the potential association between ownership structures and dividend policy. Moreover, the paper presents the first results for the UK, where the institutional framework and ownership structures are different from those of the US. Using a UK panel data set, the role of institutional ownership in association to dividend payout ratios is analysed within the context of the dividend models of Lintner [American Economic Review, 46 (1956) 97], Waud [Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1996] and Fama and Babiak [Journal of the American Statistical Association, 63 (1968) 1132]. The results consistently produce strong support for the hypothesis that a positive association exists between dividend payout policy and institutional ownership. Furthermore, the results for an earnings trend model suggest a positive earnings trend component to the association between institutional ownership and the dividend payout ratio. In addition, there is some evidence in support of the hypothesis that a negative association exists between dividend payout policy and managerial ownership.

We examine whether increasing financial expertise among independent directors facilitates bank capital decisions that promote financial stability. We find US banks with more financial expert independent directors opt for higher target capital ratios and adjust faster their capital structure when they are below the target. We provide evidence suggesting that our results are driven by the skill-set of these directors that lead to a better understanding of bank risks and access to external recapitalization choices. Our findings are further amplified by an increase in the exposure to losses of financial expert directors and by exogenous increases in regulatory scrutiny.

The view that the independent directors of large banks should contribute to safeguarding the interests of bank creditors and taxpayers, by exercising a stringent risk oversight of bank executives, has gained ground in the aftermath of the 2007–2009 crisis. Using a cross-country sample of large banks for the period 2004–2014, we show that post 2009 an increase in board independence leads to more prudent bank risk-taking compared to the rest of the sample period. This effect materializes via independent boards favoring increases in bank capitalization and decreases in bank portfolio risk after the global crisis. Additional analyses demonstrate, however, that these results do not hold for all large banks in our sample but are confined to the group of banks benefiting from a government bailout during the crisis. In most large international banks board independence does not contribute to safeguarding the interests of bank creditors and taxpayers by constraining bank risk-taking.

We examine how information risk and transaction costs influence the initial and subsequent market reaction to earnings news. We find that the initial market reaction is higher per unit of earnings surprise for higher information risk firms (information content effect). Furthermore, it is information risk that induces transaction costs that limit the initial market reaction and lead to higher subsequent drift (transaction costs effect). Information risk does not have an effect on drift beyond that achieved through transaction costs. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding the linkage between information risk and transaction costs in price discovery around public disclosure.

Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size (measured as a bank’s liabilities divided by national GDP) are linked to banks displaying higher tail risk. This effect is not entirely due to risk channels that disproportionately expose relatively large banks to systematic tail risks, sovereign risks, or banking crises. Instead, we detect a persistent component in the tail risk of relatively large banks that is bank-specific and connected to government guarantees. Furthermore, as banks grow in relative size, tail risks are shifted to debtholders without wealth gains for shareholders.

Catastrophe (Cat) bonds are insurance securitization vehicles which are supposed to transfer catastrophe-related underwriting risk from issuers to capital markets. This paper addresses key, unanswered questions concerning Cat bonds and offers the following results. First, our findings show firms that issue Cat bonds exhibit less risky underwriting portfolios with less exposure to catastrophe risks and overall less need to hedge catastrophe risk. These results show that the access to the market for insurance securitization is easiest for firms with less risky portfolios. Second, firms that issue Cat bonds are found to experience a reduction in their default risk relative to non-issuing firms and our results, therefore, demonstrate that Cat bonds provide effective catastrophe hedging for issuing firms. Third, firms with less catastrophe exposure, increase their catastrophe exposure following an issue. Therefore, our paper cautions that the ability to hedge catastrophe risk causes some firms to seek additional catastrophe risk.