The paper aims at outlining the existing gaps in Bulgarian corporate governance compared to the standards and the state of corporate governance in developed market economies. The current state of corporate governance, the degree of ownership concentration as well as the strengths and weaknesses...

India, with its 20 million shareholders, is one of the largest emerging markets in terms of the market capitalization. In order to protect the large investor base, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has enforced a regulation effective from April 2001, requiring mandatory...

Economists tend to agree that the recent cutting of dividends taxes will encourage investment and reduce financial distress. In addition to creating these “benefits,” however, the tax cut can also increase governance costs. For example, by removing a bias for leveraged capital structures,...

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...

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...

In recent years, one area of growing concern in corporate governance is the accounting and transfer of risk using special purpose entities (or trusts). Such entities are used widely in issuing asset-backed securities. This paper provides an overview of the asset-backed securities market, and...

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...