Corporate Governance relates to mechanisms through which providers of resources to the firm get their share of resources in return. Adequate governance practices help develop capital markets and assist market forces in attaining efficient contracts. Convincing evidence exists that well developed...

The use of equity derivatives to conceal economic ownership of shares (“hidden ownership”) is increasingly drawing attention from the financial community, as is the exercise of voting power without corresponding economic interest (“empty voting”). Market participants and commentators...

Regulators, proxy advisors and shareholders are regularly calling for independent directors. However, at the same time, independent directors commonly engage in numerous outside activities potentially reducing their time and commitment with the particular firm. Using Tobin's Q as an...

In the wake of the financial crisis, shareholders are increasingly relied upon to monitor directors. But while much has been written about directors' flawed judgments, remarkably little is known about shareholders' ability to make accurate judgments. What determines whether shareholders make the...

It is widely argued that foreign investment is a mechanism for improving corporate governance in emerging markets. The results of this paper, which uses firm-level data on 365 Thai firms, challenge this conventional wisdom. A firm-specific index of the quality of corporate governance is...

This paper aims to analyze the relation between business models, quality of governance and performance achieved by banks during the period 2005-2008. Coherently with a substantial literature which has spent its effort on researching for the relation between quality of governance and banks’...

We use extensive hand collected surveys reporting governance practices of Brazilian firms in 2004, 2006, and 2009 to build a broad corporate governance index and analyze the evolution of corporate governance in Brazil and the association between governance and firm value. We find that corporate...

The correlation between governance indices and abnormal returns documented for 1990–1999 subsequently disappeared. The correlation and its disappearance are both due to market participants' gradually learning to appreciate the difference between good-governance and poor-governance firms....

Recent studies have debated the impact of investor protection law on corporate behavior and value. I exploit the staggered passage of state securities fraud statutes (“blue sky laws”) in the United States to estimate the causal effects of investor protection law on firm financing decisions...

We intend to reveal the causes and the determinants of the omitted shareholder proposals. We find that individual investors are mostly likely to submit a proposal being excluded from the proxy ballot. Since individual investors are not so skillful as institutional investors, we summarize that...