Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the financial expertise of the audit committee (AC) and the incidence of misappropriation of assets in publicly held companies in the USA. Design/methodology/approach – The sample consists of 28 publicly held...

The aim of this article is to show the existence of a relationship between voluntary disclosure via corporate websites and the ex-ante cost of capital of companies listed on the BM&FBovespa. Ordinary least-squares regression equations produced the following results: (a) on average, the companies...

The paper tests the hypothesis that highly leveraged firms lose market shares to their less leveraged rivals in an industry downturn. Both parametric and semiparametric regression methods are applied to analyse the relationships between firm performance and leverage. It is found that the highly...

Equity ownership by public pension funds (PPFs) is widely used in the literature (see, e.g., Cremers and Nair <CitationRef CitationID="CR6">2005</CitationRef>; Dittmar and Mahrt-Smith <CitationRef CitationID="CR10">2007</CitationRef>) as a measure of the strength of shareholder monitoring/governance. This paper raises caution on such practices by illustrating an inverted-U shape...</citationref></citationref>

This paper investigates the impact of social ties on the effectiveness of boards of directors. When the chief executive officer (CEO) and a number of directors belong to the same social networks, the CEO is less likely to be dismissed for poor performance. The results are robust to different...

Prior empirical research finds positive, negative and neutral relationships between family involvement in business and firm performance. We argue that some of the challenges that have plagued empirical research in this field are related to the measurement of family involvement in business....