South Africa (SA) has pursued corporate governance reforms in the form of the 1994 and 2002 King Reports. This paper examines the association between the presence of independent non-executive directors (INEDs) and market valuation of a sample of 169 firms listed on the Johannesburg Stock...

Shareholder agreements are contracts that govern the relationship among different shareholders in a firm. This article uses a unique dataset to analyze shareholder agreements in listed companies and shows how they affect firm valuation. While shareholder agreements may be used to expropriate...

An expanding literature asserts that non-US firms achieve a unique valuation premium for listing on US equity markets. In this paper we test the uniqueness of the US foreign listing premium by examining the premium achieved by foreign listings across a global set of stock exchanges. We highlight...

We investigate whether the diversification discount occurs partly as an artifact of poor corporate governance. In panel data models, we find that the discount narrows by 16% to 21% when we add governance variables as regression controls. We also estimate Heckman selection models that account for...

Using a 57-year global panel of listings on foreign stock exchanges, we identify waves in foreign listing activity at the host market, home market, and industry levels. We observe that the waves in the host market are often due to cross-listing waves in home markets or industries that share a...

An expanding literature asserts that non-U.S. firms achieve a value premium for listing on U.S. equity markets. In this paper we examine the foreign listing premium across a global sample of home and host markets, including U.S. firms that list on non-U.S. stock exchanges. We find that the value...

The question of whether the CEO should also serve as chairman of the board is one of themost hotly debated issues in the recent corporate governance discussion. While agencytheoreticarguments advocate a separation of decision and control functions, the empiricalevidence focusing on U.S....

We use the deaths of directors and chief executive officers as a natural experiment to generate exogenous variation in the time and resources available to independent directors at interlocked firms. The loss of such key co-employees is an attention shock because it increases the board committee...