Janis Berzins

16th Corporate Finance Day

16th Corporate Finance Day

CICF

IESEG

Baltic Economic Association Conference

EFA

BI Norwegian Business School

BI Norwegian Business School

BI Finance Brown Bag Seminar

ERMAS Annual Conference of the Romanian Academic Economists from Abroad

BI Norwegian Business School

Comparative Corporate Governance Workshop

19th Workshop on Corporate Governance and Investment

Skatteforum, Sandefjord

Handelshøyskolen BI

Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation

Research Seminar

General Annual Meeting, CFA-Oslo

Multinational Finance Society Conference

Working paper, CCGR

World Finance Conference

Working paper; CCGR

12th Workshop on Corporate Governance and Investment

Handelshøyskolen BI

This paper examines how dividend policy influences conflicts of interest between majority and minority stockholders in a large sample of private firms with controlling blockholders. We find that a higher potential for stockholder conflicts is associated with higher payout. This tendency is stronger when the minority stockholder structure is diffuse and when the minority is not on the firm’s board. Minority-friendly payout is also associated with higher subsequent minority investment in the firm. These findings are consistent with the notion that dividend policy is used to mitigate agency costs, particularly when this benefits the majority in the longer run.

Internseminar

Norwegian-German Seminar on Public Economics

BI Norwegian Business School

Multinational Finance Society Conference

CCGR Workshop

SEVENTH NORWEGIAN-GERMAN SEMINAR ON PUBLIC ECONOMICS

Handelshøyskolen BI

Handelshøyskolen BI

We analyze a wide range of corporate finance and governance characteristics in all active Norwegian firms with limited liability over the period 1994-2005. This sample includes about 77,000 nonlisted (private) firms and 135 listed (public) firms per year. Nonlisted firms have barely been addressed in the finance literature, despite our finding that they employ four times more people than listed firms, have about four times higher revenues, hold twice as much assets, and constitute over 99% of the enterprises. Indirect evidence suggests that this is also the typical situation worldwide. The unexplored nature of nonlisted firms makes us address a large set of characteristics, and to focus more on describing overall patterns in the data rather than making elaborate tests of behavioral hypotheses. We find that the size distribution of firms in the economy is close to lognormal, which is consistent with independence between size and growth for the individual firm.

BI Norwegian Business School

Mutual Funds Conference