Luc Renneboog

The Family Firm provides a comprehensive literature review of the heterogeneous characteristics of family firms based on over 400 recent and relevant academic articles. The review of the literature is organized around five main topics: business and family values, succession, family firm strategies, family ownership and governance, and financial policies. The literature review is supplemented with the analysis of a detailed survey of more than 900 Dutch family firms. This empirical analysis serves to illustrate that family firms indeed exhibit substantial heterogeneity along the five main topics considered in the review. In addition, the empirical analysis also highlights that different dimensions of heterogeneity are often strongly correlated. This monograph advances our understanding of family firms by taking stock of extant work and highlighting important research gaps. There are important practical implications in that the heterogeneous nature of family firms might make overly broad regulatory actions ineffective. Policymakers should take an interest in this work as it allows them to accommodate specific regulations to the intended subset of family firms. The findings should also interest family entrepreneurs and investors in family firms by providing a general theoretical and practical overview of how family firms differ from each other and under which circumstances specific actions, organizational strategies, and corporate behaviour might have heterogeneous effects.

Leveraged Buyouts: Motives and Sources of Value analyzes the motives for taking public firms private and provides a structured and critical review of the empirical research in this area. The authors examine which types of firms go private and the determinants of takeover premiums in LBO transactions; investigate whether the post-transaction value creation, as well as the duration of the private status, can be explained by the aforementioned potential value drivers; answer the questions whether or not Public-to-Private (PTP) transactions lead to superior organizational forms compared to public firms, and whether going private is a shock therapy to restructure firms generating both strong short- and long-term returns; and document the trends and drivers of global LBO activity in the 1980s, 1990s, and the subsequent decades. After a short introduction, Section 2 briefly discusses on the different types of leveraged buyouts and going-private transactions. Section 3 discusses the theoretical considerations underlying the sources of wealth gains from going private deals. Section 4 focuses on the four main strands of the literature - namely, on the Intent to do an LBO, on the Impact of the LBO measured by changes in the share price returns, on the LBO Process or on how the firm is restructured in the post-LBO stage, and on the Duration of being a private firm - and on the empirical evidence supporting the eight motives proposed by each strand of the literature. Section 5 explains the drivers behind the observed LBO waves that emerged over the past 35 years. Section 6 lines out a future research agenda.

Dividends are not only a signal about a firm's prospects under asymmetric information, but they can also act as a corporate governance device to align the management's interests with those of the shareholders. Dividend Policy and Corporate Governance is the first comprehensive volume on the relationship between dividend policy and corporate governance, and examines in detail empirical studies and current theories. Reviewing the interactions between dividend policy and other corporate governance mechanisms, it compares results for the UK and the US with those for other countries such as France, Germany, and Japan, and provides new empirical evidence on corporate governance in continental Europe and its impact on dividends. Focusing on one of the main representatives of this system, Germany, it highlights major differences between the dividend policies of German firms and those of UK or US firms. Conventional wisdom states that German dividends are lower than UK or US dividends, yet on a published-profits basis the exact converse is true. In addition, the authors demonstrate a link between corporate control structures and dividend payouts, report evidence that the existence of a loss is an additional determinant of dividend changes, and demonstrate that the tax status of the controlling shareholder and the firm's dividend payout are not linked. The conclusions reached in this book have important implications for the current debate on corporate governance, making it invaluable for academics, finance professionals, regulators, and legal advisors.