In this discussion draft, linking research findings with concrete operational challenges, we review key issues in worldwide governance, and present recent empirical evidence. Focusing on defining and unbundling key governance components, such as rule of law, voice and accountability, corruption...

Stock market reactions to political events demonstrate that the value of some firms is strongly affected by which party controls political power. However, contrary to common perception, event studies do not indicate that the ability to make unlimited political contributions or expenditures...

Theories of the firm based on agency theory, transaction cost economics, and the nexus of contract conception have gained currency in the past three decades. These theories emphasize the central constitutive role of contracts for firms. Critics have charged that these theories ignore crucial...

quot;Taking Stockquot; explores the place of newspaper journalism in the publicly traded newspaper companies. It does so through an analysis at the level of the firm and the organization of the publicly held business entity and its subsidiaries, analyzing financial operations, organization and...

This article examines private equity firms as an example of partnership-type, or uncorporate, structures in the governance of large firms. Other examples include publicly traded partnerships, real estate investment trusts, hedge funds and venture capital funds. These firms can be seen as an...

Behavioral finance raises questions about market efficiency, suggesting that noise, and not just information, moves securities prices. This creates a conundrum for the fraud on the market theory. While some fraud remedy is arguably necessary to ensure adequate disclosure, behavioral finance...

The most significant structural change undergone by the British and Swiss economies during the past 25 years (1975-2000) is indisputably the development of their financial systems. From this point of view, the two countries show a number of similarities: the presence of one or more international...

During a period of increasing turbulence and uncertainty in the corporate world, this timely paper contains the complete body of work addressed in the quot;Corporate Defense Insights: Dispatches from the Front Linequot; Qamp;A series (individually published at the RiskCenter throughout the...

If we consider corporate defense as representing an organization's program of self-defense, we are referring to the structures, measures, mechanisms and processes aimed at defending the interests of all of its stakeholders (including its people). Managing corporate defense is therefore an...

One of the main achievements of Herbert A. Simon in organizational theory is analytically evaluating the psychology of individual and collective behavior thus opening the ground for further research D. Kahneman, and T. Schelling. This article provides an assessment of the contributions of...