Employing a new method of industry tests we examine investment bank governance. Most of the findings reject the view that banks are governed suboptimally over a sample period from 1990 through 2003. CEO pay is large and significantly sensitive to stock price performance, and stock price...

This study evaluates the effects of concentrated management (board director) ownership on changes of firm performance (value and ROA) following the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-98), a shock period when corporate governance structures are of greater concern and strongly tested. Our results show...

This paper investigates the effect of corporate governance reforms on the balance between ownership and control in a country characterized by poor investor protection. We use the example of Italy, where major reforms were passed in 1998 to protect minority shareholders from the risks of...

Previous studies (e.g., Sun and Tong, 2003; Wang et al., 2004) show that Share Issue Privatization (SIP) in China did not improve the profitability of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs). This is puzzling given that SIP improves firm profitability almost around the world and China's economic reform is...

We examine the wealth effects of three regulatory changes designed to improve minority-shareholder protection in the Chinese stock markets. Using the value of a firm's related-party transactions as an inverse proxy for the quality of corporate governance, we find that firms with weaker...

This paper investigates Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deregistrations by foreign firms from the time the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed in 2002 through 2008. We test two theories, the bonding theory and the loss of competitiveness theory, to understand why foreign firms leave...

This paper shows that marriage can function in a similar way as mergers and acquisitions. To set up alliances that would benefit the firms, a controlling family would encourage their children to marry a person from a politically or economically powerful family. To test this hypothesis, we...

We study the impact of political institutions on foreign firms’ choice of their U.S. cross-listing venue. Using two measures of the quality of political institutions (the political rights index and the political constraint index) and controlling for various firm-level and country-level...

This paper reviews the research on the $6.65trillion dollar Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF). The literature, which has only appeared in the last few years, focuses for the most part on the investment behavior of SWFs, especially in light of calls for the regulation of these financial entities. The...

In view of recent corporate scandals, it is argued that corporate governance can learn from public governance. Institutions devised to control and discipline the behaviour of executives in the political sphere can give new insights into how to improve the governance of firms. Some proposal such...