This paper seeks to establish what form of management structure, ownership structure and financial characteristics are exhibited by firms that propose and subsequently adopt anti‐takeover charter amendments (ATCAs) in Australia over the period June 1986 to December 1990. An ATCA is a restriction of partial takeover activity implemented though shareholder approval to changes in a firm’s constitution. Approval for such changes is obtained through majority agreement from a plebiscite of shareholders. The study adopts a control sample design to analyse if characteristics differ statistically from adopting ATCA firms and those which do not adopt ATCAs during the investigation period. Following this, a logit analysis establishes the importance of variables considered to have a role in distinguishing between ATCA adoptees and firms without ATCAs. This research is motivated by the fact that little is known about the reasons for alternative corporate governance structures in Australia and is a natural extension to Armstrong, Lange and Woo (1994) which determined that firms adopting ATCAs were likely to experience increases in firm value around the announcement date of the ATCA.

This paper examines management-induced antitakeover activity which occurred in

This paper develops a cross-market model to extend Huang and Stoll (1997) by utilizing information from trade flows in the options market. Empirical tests reveal a significant increase in the estimated adverse information component, which stays consistent irrespective of the degree of option leverage. Further, intraday variation in stock bid-ask spread components is affected by the stock trade size and the extent of imbalance in information-based option trades. Including the options market information in decomposition of the stock bid-ask spread enhances the quality of its estimation.

The ‘law matters’ thesis is undisputed, keenly preserved and persuasively argued in the legal literature. For something to matter, relevance or importance depends on the audience - the readers or users of that material. This research critically examines the law matters thesis, considering to whom it matters and why. This research also critiques the law matters thesis from a perspective largely beyond the mainstream law journals and yields perspectives often overlooked in the law literature. ‘Law matters’ advocates argue that the existence of strong investor protection results in observed economic growth and development of capital markets. While one might conclude there is a strong correlation between legal culture and financial capital market development in legal research, non-legal research provides counter-evidence that legal culture alone does not determine financial market growth in East Asia

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