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...

Recent policy initiatives within the harmonization of European company laws have promoted a so-called "principle of proportionality" through proposals that regulate mechanisms opposing a proportional distribution of ownership and control. We scrutinize the foundation for these initiatives by...

The legal environment is one important determinant of corporate governance. However,  within  legal families,  also cultural  differences can explain the level of corporate governance to some extent. We analyze this relationship for the case of Switzerland.  Swiss firms  are mainly located...

In March 2008, Malaysia’s political landscape was shaken by election results showing that the Barisan Nasional had won less than two thirds of the parliamentary seats and lost five states to the opposition. A two-thirds supermajority had been seen as a sacred threshold for the coalition to...

There is debate over the relationship between ownership structure and firm performance. Most existing studies look at established listed companies in developed countries, in which the market mechanism is well developed. Meanwhile, the relationship between ownership structure and firm performance...

As a part of the ongoing liberalization of the marketplace, Chinese regulators adopted the guideline called “Regulation of Equity Incentive Plans (trial)” to allow firms to provide employee incentives through employee stock option plans. Firms began initiating the plans in 2006. We...

We examine the impact of mutual fund ownership on stock price informativeness in China. Existing evidence shows that stock price informativeness is low in China, and attributes this to firms’ lack of disclosure incentives under the weak investor protection institutional environment. Mutual...

(VF)Cette recherche analyse le phénomène de la diffusion d’information par Internet en France. En prolongeant les études antérieures sur l’offre volontaire d’information, nous cherchons à savoir comment les facteurs du gouvernement d’entreprise influent sur la communication par voie...

This paper investigates the link between firm headquarters location and its stock return co-movements in a full sample of Chinese listed firms from 1999 to 2007. The empirical results show a significant stock return co-movement pattern for firms located in the same province. And both firm-level...

This paper investigates politically connected firms in Germany. With the introduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional income sources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available. We find that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the...