International Convoluted Ownership Structure in Accounting and Finance : A Succinct Survey

Corporate governance can be old cliché as internal and external types. Internal corporate governance is the mechanism by which firms' governing managers align their activities with stakeholder interests through the composition of the board, audit committees, and compensation committees as well as the ownership structure. External corporate governance occurs overweightingly and dominantly through mechanisms, such as legal protections and takeovers imposed by the capital market, that are external to the firm that protects stakeholder interests. Since the scope of corporate governance is too broad to address here, this article examines only its ownership structure dimension and its impact on firm performance, cost of capital, dividend policy, disclosure, and conservatism. Researchers have been investigating these issues for decades, with gobsmacking inconclusive results. Recent papers have provided new insights by which we may examine the issues in more detail. For instance, Chen et al. (2012) suggest that family CEOs in family firms produce less turnover and lower share returns than do non-family CEOs in family firms, leading to the temeritous question of whether the chairperson and CEO governance functions should be separated and pointing to future research into whether family firms with family CEOs generate lower or higher earnings. Haw et al. (2012), concerning conservatism, investigates whether the second largest shareholders in firms with multiple shareholdings and a cash flow right dispersion can shape conservatism in financial statements. They argue that the dispersion of cash flow rights for multiple shareholders creates monitoring problems for firms, leading to the agency problem and increasingly conservative accounting in financial statements. Studies have shown that managerial incentives to adopt highly conservative accounting include taxation, debts covenants, and regulations. Whilst this paper attempts to demonstrate the impact of ownership structure on conservatism, future research should carefully but not pedantically investigate this issue in more detail