Empirical Studies on Financial Intermediation and Corporate Policies

This thesis investigates the impact of financial intermediaries on capital structures, corporate governance structures and the performance of firms. Throughout the world, financial intermediaries have powerful and influential positions in financial markets. The intermediaries have both the incentives and the means to influence the financial policies of the firms and initiate governance changes in underperforming management teams. On the contrary, investors have limited ability to exercise control, even though they provide debt and equity financing to firms. This thesis comprises four empirical studies. In the first study, the author analyses the impact of information asymmetry between the U.S. firms and their lenders on firms’ choice of debt maturity. The second study shows how firm-bank relations in the form of shared board positions and equity ownerships influence capital structure decisions of Dutch firms. The following examination in the third study of Dutch managerial and supervisory board turnover further demonstrates the strong position of financial institutions in disciplining underperforming management. The fourth and final analysis in this thesis relates the dispersion in analyst forecasts to the differences in investor opinions and investigates how the heterogeneity of investor beliefs affects prices of European stocks.

Petra Daniševská was born in Pardubice, the Czech Republic, in 1975. From 1993 till 1999 she studied financial economics at the University of Economics in Prague. During this time she spent half a year as an exchange student at the University of Plymouth in the U.K. She furthermore completed an internship on initial public offerings in the research department of the ING Investment Management in The Hague. From 1997 till October 1999 she worked as an analyst in the reporting and planning department of the Nationale Nederlanden in Prague. In 1999, she graduated with major in financial economics and minor in European economic integration. Petra Daniševská joined the Department of Financial Management of Erasmus University Rotterdam as a Ph.D. student in November 1999. Since May 2004 she has been working as an analyst in the Mortgage Finance and Asset Securitization Department of NIBCapital in The Hague.