"Corporate restructurings - the case of equity carve-outs"

Firms are subject to permanent revision and dynamic changes in their day-to-day environment. Therefore, they have to engage in sequential learning and have to adjust their objectives and their structure to new conditions. Going publics of subsidiaries, synonymously for equity carve-outs, are a special type of corporate restructuring which became more and more popular during the last years and, consequently, received increasingly attention in the mass media. The equity carve-outs of Deutsche Postbank, Infineon or T-Online belong to the most known and most controversially discussed IPOs in recent German history. Economic reasons to engage in an equity carve-out are broad and range from improved efficiency to enhanced access to additional sources of financing. These aspects make equity carve-outs especially interesting for academic research as well as for practitioners, which is why the focus of this book is restricted to the characteristics and the implications of this very form of divestitures. In doing so, it targets several aspects of equity carve-outs that have not attracted much attention in the previous literature. In particular, the book provides insights in the design of equity carve-outs, the characteristics of equity carve-outs compared to conventional IPOs, and in cross-country differences. Moreover, the existence of a European sample of equity carve-outs allows the author, among other things, to focus on international as well as on individual differences in corporate governance.