This technical note on Investor Protection, Disclosure, and Financial Literacy for Portugal explains investor protection and corporate governance. Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM) is the regulator in charge on ensuring compliance with disclosure issues as well as the corporate...

This article reviews Germany's corporate governance system and the effectiveness of recent reforms. Since the early 1990s far-reaching reforms have complemented the traditional stakeholder system with important elements of the shareholder system. Instead of taking a view on the superiority of...

This technical note assesses the reform of Spanish savings banks (SSBs). It provides a brief overview of the SSB institutional framework before the reform, and describes the main factors that led to the financial distress, albeit uneven, of the SSB sector. The note outlines major regulatory and...

The study of the relationship between corporate governance and financial performance is an ambiguous theme. Several studies have focused on this topic by defining a relationship between the firm performance and its ownership structure. However, empirical findings did not reach a consensus on the...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of ownership structure on derivatives' use policy. Using data for 262 French non-financial listed firms, the results show that the two decisions of whether to use derivatives or not and the extent of derivatives use are not affected by the...

The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of internal governance mechanisms related to the board of directors, the audit committee and the ownership structure on the value relevance of accounting earnings in the French context. Using the method of Panel Corrected Standard Errors in...

A good corporate governance framework should combine transparency, accountability and integrity and this requires knowledge of beneficial ownership. The protection of minority investors and other stakeholder protection will be challenging without access to reliable information about the...

There are two main sources of confusion in the public corporate governance debate. One is the confusion about the role of public policy intervention. The other is a lack of empirical knowledge about the corporate landscape where rules are supposed to be implemented and the functioning of...