Oleksandr Talavera

Influence of Family Involvement in Management and Ownership on Firm Performance: Evidence From Poland

This article investigates the influence of family involvement on firm performance in an emerging market economy. Using a panel of 217 Polish companies from 1997 to 2005, the authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the share of family ownership and firm performance. The data also reveal that firms with family CEOs are likely to outperform their counterparts that have nonfamily CEOs. The results take into account the endogeneity of family ownership and are robust to a number of specification checks.

Corporate Governance and Dividend Policy in Poland

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we explore the determinants of the dividend policy in Poland. Second, we test whether corporate governance practices determine the dividend policy in the non-financial companies listed on Warsaw Stock Exchange. We compose, for the first time, quantitative measures on the quality of the corporate governance for 110 non-financial listed companies. Our results suggest that large and more profitable companies have a higher dividend payout ratio. Furthermore, riskier and more indebted firms prefer to pay lower dividends. The findings finally, based on the period 1998-2004, demonstrate that an increase in the TDI or its subindices that represent corporate governance practices brings about a statistically significant increase in the dividend-to-cash-flow ratio. Moreover, the estimates prove to be significant after the inclusion of standard additional controls.

Social Capital and Access to Bank Financing: The Case of Chinese Entrepreneurs

This paper presents the results of a study of the effects of social capital on access to bank financing. Based on a Chinese nationwide survey, our analysis suggests that entrepreneurs who contribute to charities are more likely to be successful in loan applications. In addition, we find that political party membership is an important determinant of state-owned bank financing, whereas time spent on social activities increases the probability of obtaining loans from commercial banks. Therefore, our data provide some evidence for substitutability between various types of social capital. To obtain a loan from a specific type of bank, an entrepreneur should access the relevant social network.

Price setting in online markets: Basic facts, international comparisons, and cross-border integration

We document basic facts about prices in online markets in the U.S. and Canada, a rapidly growing segment of the retail sector. Relative to prices in regular stores, prices in online markets are more flexible as well as exhibit stronger pass-through (60-75 percent) and faster convergence (half-life less than 2 months) in response to movements of the nominal exchange rate. Multiple margins of adjustment (frequency of price changes, direction of price changes, size of price changes, exit of sellers) are active in the process of responding to nominal exchange rate shocks. Furthermore, we use the richness of our dataset to show that degree of competition, stickiness of prices, synchronization of price changes, reputation of sellers, and returns to search effort are important determinants of pass-through and speed of price adjustment for international price differentials.

Does corporate governance determine dividend payouts in Poland

This study examines the relation between corporate governance practices measured by the Transparency Disclosure Index (TDI) and dividend payouts in Poland. Our empirical approach lies in constructing measures of the quality of the corporate governance in 110 non-financial companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange between 1998 and 2004.We find evidence that an increase in the TDI or its sub-indices leads to an increase in the dividend to cash flow ratio. These results support the hypothesis that companies with weak shareholder rights pay dividends less generously than do firms with high corporate governance standards. We assume that well protected shareholders in Poland use their power to extract dividends, thus our results seem to support the outcome agency model of dividends.

R&D Expenditures and Geographical Sales Diversification

This paper empirically examines the role of diversication in export markets on rm-level R&D activities taking account of the potential endogeneity in this relationship. We show that geographical sales diversication across dierent regions of the world induces UK

Why Do Firms Switch Their Main Bank? - theory and evidence from Ukraine

We examine why firms change their main bank and how this affects loans, interest payments and firm performance after switching. Using unique firm-bank matched Ukrainian data, the treatment effect estimates suggest that more transparent and riskier companies are more likely to switch their main bank. Importantly, main bank power, measured by equity holdings, appears to be one of the main drivers of firm switching behavior. Furthermore, we find that firms have lower performance after changing their main bank as they have to contend with higher interest payments.

Is Corporate Governance Effective in Ukraine

This paper studies whether and how chief executive officer turnover in Ukrainian firms is related to their performance. Based on a novel data set covering Ukrainian joint stock companies from 2002 to 2006, the paper finds a statistically significant negative association between the past performance of firms, measured by return on sales and return on assets, and the likelihood of managerial turnover. Whereas the strength of the turnover-performance relationship does not seem to depend on factors such as managerial ownership and supervisory board size, we find significant entrenchment effects associated with ownership by managers. Overall, our analysis suggests that corporate governance in Ukraine operates with a certain degree of efficiency, despite the well-known lacunas in the countrys institutional environment.

Entrepreneurship, Windfall Gains and Financial Constraints: The Case of Germany

In this paper we investigate the link between entrepreneurship and financial constraints. We develop a dynamic partial equilibrium model of an individual utility maximization that predicts that the person is more likely to start her business when financial constraints are eased. We test this hypothesis using German Socio-Economic Panel data covering the periods 2000 - 2002 and measure release from financial constraints by windfall gains. The estimates confirm that the individual has higher propensity to start her business when she gets windfall gains. Furthermore, there are stronger effects for persons that have sufficient, but not very high levels of income and abilities.

The Effects of the Bank-Internal Ratings on the Loan Maturity

The paper focuses on the effects of three different internal bank ratings - Risk-, Property- and Creditworthiness-Rating - on the loan maturity. We use a sample of about 5,000 loans given to sole proprietors and corporate borrowers by two German banks from January 2003 till July 2005. The estimation results for corporate borrowers are consistent with Diamonds (1991) predictions of non-monotonic relationship between ratings and maturity. The best rated and the worst rated loans tend to have shorter maturities than loans with an intermediate rating. However, our results for sole proprietors conflict with the predictions of Diamond and with the majority of the empirical literature. We find a negative association between ratings and maturity of the loans given to sole proprietors.