Advances in Corporate Finance and Asset Pricing

Luc Renneboog

Abstract

From a financial perspective, the past decade was remarkable. It is characterized by an unprecedented number of corporate restructurings in terms of mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, public-to-private transactions, spin-offs and divestitures, and leveraged recapitalizations. The first part of this book focuses on reorganizations from different perspectives: restructurings in Europe versus the US, short versus long term wealth effects of mergers and acquisitions, the international evidence of spin-offs and corporate focus strategies, and the consolidation in the banking world. In recent years, there have also been many changes in corporate governance regulation, triggered by a host of corporate scandals. Part 2 of this book will cover these issues on the international and domestic levels. It also deals with the effectiveness of specific corporate governance devices like shareholder lock-in agreements and managerial stock options. In part 3, the focus is on the changes in and the determinants of capital structure. In particular, the authors discuss convertible debt issues, give a historical perspective of the evolution of capital structure and also give an explanation for the importance of the interbank loan market. Asset pricing and monetary economics is the topic of the last part of the book. Here, models to improve portfolio theories and interest rate structures are proposed, momentum in stock prices is analyzed and the reasons for the changes in the monetary policy of the central banks over the last 3 decades are examined.