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....

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...

This paper is the rst to empirically analyze the value to shareholders of the power to havea binding vote on management pay. We nd that in response to an unanticipated eventthat made it likely that an annual binding vote would become compulsory for Swiss publiccompanies, the apparent immediate...

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...

We examine the coexistence of banks and financial markets, studyinga credit market where the qualities of investment projects are notobservable and the investment decisions of entrepreneurs are not contractible...