In this paper we use interview data to explore the new shareholder activism of mainstream UK institutional investors. We describe contemporary practices of corporate governance monitoring and engagement and how they vary across institutions, and explore the motivations behind them. Existing...

We draw on a series of in-depth interviews with senior fund managers and senior company executives to explore how different and often-contradictory conceptualizations of institutional investors, their role in the corporate governance process, and their interactions with corporate management, are...

This essay argues that the Enron affair has been misunderstood as a failure of monitoring, with adverse consequences for the drafting of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Higgs report. Where Enron’s board failed was in underestimating the risks that were inherent in the company’s business plan...

Prior to the global financial crisis which began in 2007, corporate governance reforms of the preceding thirty years had promoted a shareholder-value based model of management for which there was little historical precedent. The underlying legal model of the firm retained a vestigial sense of...

The current financial crisis has given rise to calls to toughen considerably the codes of corporate governance put in place in many countries to regulate corporate behaviour (e.g. the UK Combined Code). These codes vary slightly in form but tend to contain a mix of non-discretionary regulations...

The return to economic liberalism in the Anglo-Saxon world was motivated by the apparent failure of Keynesian economic management to control the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the theories of economic liberalism, championed by Friederich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and...

We examine the impact of acquisitions on executive pay in UK acquirers over 1984-2001. For the overall sample, which includes foreign, domestic, public and private targets, there is a significant transitory pay increase. Pay changes are not affected by target nationality or organizational form,...

The statutory protection currently provided by UK law to employees during transfers of undertakings and other restructurings has been criticised on the grounds that it undermines insolvency procedures and interferes with the 'rescue' process. We present an analysis which suggests that granting...

The Slovenian Corporate Governance Code for Public Joint-Stock Companies was adopted in March 2004. Using a systems-theoretical approach, we examine the extent to which the implementation of the Code has resulted in the kinds of 'reflexive' learning processes which the 'comply or explain'...

This paper tests the accuracy of Roe's (2003) claim that 'social democracies' tend to have insider-orientated corporate governance systems, for two extreme cases concerning Roe's independent variable: Switzerland and Sweden. Starting from a position in which both were clearly insider-orientated...