Mutual funds are significant blockholders in many corporations. Concerns that funds vote in a pro-management manner to garner lucrative pensions contracts led the SEC to mandate the disclosure of proxy votes. We present a model of mutual fund voting in the presence of potential business ties. We...

An intense debate on the use of limited-voting shares developed in the UK during the 1950s. Using a unique hand-collected dataset, we show that negative news coverage of limited-voting shares is associated with an increase in the relative price of voting and limited-voting shares (the voting...

We develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs' time use. The idea - sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up - is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm's priorities as well as the presence of governance issues. We follow 94 CEOs of...

We follow the evolution of ownership structure in a sample of 80 Israeli companies that unified their dual-class shares in the 1990s, and compare it with a control sample of firms that maintained their dual share structure at least until 2000. Our main findings are as follows. First, controlling...

The paper investigates whether the Japanese monetary authorities use post-retirement employment of Ministry of Finance (MoF) and Bank of Japan (BoJ) officials as a policy instrument. The authors also investigate whether industrial groupings (keiretsu) and main banks have monitoring functions....

Major technological, regulatory, and institutional changes have made finance more widely available in recent years, amounting to a bona fide ‘financial revolution’. In this article, we focus on the impact the financial revolution has had on the way firms are (or should be) organized and...

We argue in favour of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle about the ultimate goal of the company....

Countries appear to differ considerably in the basic orientations of their corporate governance structures. We postulate the trade-off between objectivity and proximity as fundamental to the corporate governance debate. We stress the value of objectivity that comes with distance (e.g. the market...

This paper summarizes my own personal view of what corporate governance is about. I argue that it makes sense to discuss corporate governance only in an incomplete contract world. In this world, the notion of corporate governance is intrinsically related to the definition of the firm. In this...

This paper examines the hypothesis that firms in competitive industries should benefit relatively less from good governance, while firms in non-competitive industries--where lack of competitive pressure fails to enforce discipline on managers--should benefit relatively more. Whether we look at...