Einleitung: In der zweiten Hälfte der neunziger Jahre ist die Verbesserung der CorporateGovernance börsennotierter Gesellschaften zu einem intensiv diskutiertenThema geworden. Im Unterschied zu früheren Debatten, wie sie vor etwazwanzig Jahren anlässlich der Arbeit von Jensen/Meckling (1976)...

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....

Little is known about the relationship between family firms and their employees. This paper aims to close this gap. We distinguish between family management and family ownership as two dimensions of family firms and analyze their respective influence on downsizing. Our findings show that family...

The paper investigates whether the presence and tenure of Private Equity (PE) investmentin European companies improves their performance. Previous studies documentedthe unambiguous merit of a buyout during the 1980s and 1990s for listedfirms in the US and UK markets. This study analyzes such...

Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lowerexpected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. Thispaper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governancealso help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the German corporate governance ratingrecently developed by Drobetz, Schillhofer, and Zimmermann (2004). We find anon- linear relationship between ownership concentration and the quality of firmlevelcorporate governance as measured by the rating. Firms...

This paper studies the short- and long-run announcement effects of declaring compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code (the Code). We examine a unique, hand-collected data set of 317 German listed firms from 2002-2005. First, we present evidence from an analysis of firms compliance...

Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lowerexpected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. Thispaper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governancealso help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms...

Die aktuelle Corporate Governance Literatur stützt die verbreitete Hypothe-se, dass sicht „gute“ Corporate Governance durch eine höhere Unterneh-mensbewertung manifestiert. Die Mehrzahl der empirischen Studien unter-sucht jedoch nur ausgewählte Corporate Governance Mechanismen...

Using a comprehensive set of listed Swiss companies, our findings suggestthat the size of the board of directors is an independent control mechanism.However, in contrast to previous studies, we do not find a significant rela-tionship between board size and firm performance. This suggests that...