This study analyzes the effect that banks' investments in corporate social responsibility (CSR) have on bank performance. I find that banks' investments in CSR have a positive impact on financial performance, measured in terms of both accounting performance and stock market value. However, not...

The paper examines the impact of business group affiliation on cost of loans in an emerging market setting. It focuses on operational strategy, organizational structure and internationalization policies of business group firms and their impact on borrowing cost of affiliated firms. Bank loans...

In this paper we put forward an alternative approach to dealing with the Charter of any organization, that essential document which ought to be regarded as the mainstay of governance. In the first place, we show that an organization carries out its tasks by becoming a responsive mechanism to...

We report on the current state and important older findings of empirical studies on corporate credit ratings and their relationship to ratings of other entities. Specifically, we consider the results of three lines of research: The correlation of credit ratings and corporate default, the...

Until late in the twentieth century, internal corporate governance - that is, decision making by the principal constituencies of the firm - was clearly distinct from outside oversight by regulators, auditors and credit rating agencies, and markets. With the 1980s takeover wave and hedge funds'...

The paper investigates the determinants of bank board structure in Ghana and finds that the Scope of Operations Hypothesis could explain the variation in board size but not board independence. On the other hand, the Board Monitoring Hypothesis could only explain the variation in board...

Should boards of financial firms be blamed for the financial crisis? Using a large sample of data on nonfinancial and financial firms for the period 1996-2007, I document that the governance of financial firms is, on average, not obviously worse than in nonfinancial firms. In fact, using simple...

Pension funds and sovereign-wealth funds own a large and increasing fraction of the shares in publicly traded companies in the OECD area. These funds typically have a very long time horizon on their investments, as well as highly diversified portfolios. These features imply that the interests of...

Asset owners (principals) typically do not manage their own investments and leave this job to delegated managers (agents). What is best for the asset owner, however, is usually not best for the fund manager. Additional agency conflicts arise when the asset owner does not know the quality and...

We investigate how borrowers' corporate governance influences bank loan contracting terms in emerging markets and how this relation varies across countries with different country-level governance. We find that borrowers with stronger corporate governance obtain favorable contracting terms with...