The present paper proposes to employ a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. We use the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift and estimate the...

Family businesses carry the weight of economic wealth creation in most economies. In the U.S. alone, family businesses account for 80 to 90 percent of the 18-million business enterprises in the United States, and 50 percent of the employment and GNP. In many ways, the family business is...

In this article, we provide an interpretation for the voluntary independence requirements contained in the Italian Corporate Governance Code (Preda Code) checking them against a proxy for international best practice, the independence criteria provided in the EC Recommendation on non-executive...

Evidence contrasting insider trades in the U.S. between high- and low- jeopardy periods and across firms at high and low risk for 10b-5 litigation indicates insiders condition their trades on foreknowledge of price-relevant public disclosures, but avoid profitable trades when jeopardy due to...

Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity...

The upgrading of the Greek capital market and the effort to join other mature capital markets has posed corporate governance reform as a first priority. In addition, the 2004 Olympic Games put the Greek market in the international spotlight and will likely invite interest from foreign investors....

This article looks at the past development and potential of the Rhenish capitalist model. We discuss the origins and nature of the model and the model in crisis. Because, we contend, Rhineland capitalism’s future will be decided in East-Central Europe, we focus – using a survey questionnaire...

This paper studies the impact of federal state shareholdings on the performance of Russian companies. It differs from most similar studies in two respects. Firstly, it focuses on mixed ownership companies rather than conventional state enterprises. Secondly, it distinguishes between several...

The financial systems in continental Europe are moving from bank intermediation to intermediation by non-bank institutional investors. The present paper examines to what extent this implies a substitution of relationship finance by arm’s length finance or just of one form of relationship...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the determinants of multiple-bank lending - one of the main features of the bank-firm relationships in Italy. The analysis suggests that multiple bank lending is significantly and importantly linked with firms’ governance characteristics. In particular, it...