I have worked for BI since 2006. I joined BI after graduating from Indiana University Finance Department. In past, I have worked on a consulting project with SEC, as a sales manager, hotel manager, and accountant.
Research areas My interests are in Corporate Governance, Corporate Finance, and Portfolio Management. Under portfolio management, I am interested in strategy and performance attribution and information processing in mutual fund and institutional money management complexes. I am particularly interested in corporate finance and governance issues of family firms. I work on projects that examine issues such as the resolution of agency issues in private firms via dividend policy and the link between individual liquidity needs and activities in firms owned by these individuals. My interests include shocks generated by wealth tax changes.
Teaching areas
I have taught Applied Valuation, CFA Institute Reseach Challenge course, Managerial Accounting (MBA), Investment (undergraduate), Market Microstructure (undergraduate), International Finance (undergraduate, graduate, MBA, excecutive MBA), Basic Financial Management (undergraduate), Financial Intermediation and Banking (graduate). I am interested in integrating case-based teaching in otherwise regular courses.
We find that potential conflicts between majority and minority shareholders strongly influence how dividends respond to taxes. When the controlling shareholder has a smaller stake, the incentives to extract private benefits are stronger – a shareholder conflict that can be mitigated by dividend payout. We study a large and clean regulatory shock in Norway that increases the dividend tax rate for all individuals from 0% to 28%. We find that dividends drop less the higher the potential shareholder conflict, suggesting that dividend policy trades off tax and agency considerations. The average payout ratio falls by 30 percentage points when the conflict potential is low, but by only 18 points when it is high. These lower dividends cannot be explained by higher salaries to shareholders or diverse liquidity needs. We also observe a strong increase in indirect ownership of high-conflict firms through tax-exempt holding companies and suggest policy implications for intercorporate dividend taxation.
We examine how dividend policy is used to mitigate potential conflicts of interest between majority and minority shareholders in private Norwegian firms. The average payout is 50% higher if the majority shareholder’s equity stake is 55% (high conflict potential) rather than 95% (low conflict potential). Such minority-friendly payout is also associated with higher subsequent minority shareholder investment. These results suggest that controlling shareholders voluntarily use dividends to reduce agency conflicts and build trust, rather than opportunistically preferring private benefits to dividends. We show that our results are unlikely to arise from liquidity or signaling motives.
Berzins, Janis & Bøhren, Øyvind (2013)
Norske familiebedrifter - Omfang, eierstyring og lønnsomhet
29(3) , s. 57- 75.
Berzins, Janis; Trzcinka, Charles & Liu, Crocker (2013)
We find evidence that conflicts of interest are pervasive in the asset management business owned by investment banks. Using data from 1990 to 2008, we compare the alphas of mutual funds, hedge funds, and institutional funds operated by investment banks and non-bank conglomerates. We find that, while no difference exists in performance by fund type, being owned by an investment bank reduces alphas by 46 basis points per year in our baseline model. Making lead loans increases alphas, but the dispersion of fees across portfolios decreases alphas. The economic loss is $4.9 billion per year.
Bøhren, Øyvind & Berzins, Janis (2009)
Unoterte aksjeselskaper selskaper er viktige, uutforskede og spesielle
8(2) , s. 65- 75.
Berzins, Janis & Bøhren, Øyvind (2009)
Unoterte aksjeselskaper selskaper er viktige, uutforskede og spesielle
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.
Corporate finance and governance in firms with limited liability: Basic characteristics
[Report Research].
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.