Saudi Arabia has now opened its markets to foreign investors in line with its strategy to diversify its economy. However, investors need to feel confident that Saudi enterprises are being monitored and regulated appropriately. This study identifies the impact of improvements in Saudi corporate...

The role of outside directors is one of the key features in the transatlantic corporate governance debate. As their importance rises, their liability is also attracting attention. Since there are only a few cases internationally in which outside directors of listed companies have been held...

This study investigates the extent to which South African listed corporations voluntarily disclose information on black economic empowerment (BEE) in their annual and sustainability reports using a sample of 75 listed corporations from 2003 to 2009. BEE is a form of socio-economic affirmative...

This article attempts to disentangle the various issues a public company should consider when answering the question: “to go or not to go private?” It provides a review of the literature with an eye towards coverage of the main questions a practitioner would ask. The article explores factors...

In this paper, we first shed light on the factors that underlie the differences between the ‘shareholder wealth maximization' and the ‘long-term commitment' models of corporate governance. By introducing a third type of governance model, we show that a three-dimensional approach provides a...

Research question/issue: This study examines how ownership structure affects the presence of female directors on supervisory and management boards and the related advantages of gender diversity in the boardroom. It was conducted in a post-communist country and the argument is that the process of...

Using a panel dataset for 369 firm-year observations during the period 2005-2013 in the Italian context, we investigate the impact of certain characteristics of corporate boards on the magnitude of corporate Research and Development (R&D). Our findings reveal a negative relationship between R&D...

Japanese firms that have traditionally had large boards have recently become subject to pressures for small boards. This study shows that Japanese firms that substantially decreased board size tended to adopt an officer system and so did not substantially decrease the size of the management team...

Companies worldwide increasingly engaged in corporate social responsibility disclosure, particularly corporate environmental disclosure (CED) has gained increasing importance since the 1980s. Reporting environmental performance has become a fundamental corporate governance mechanism to improve...

For three academic years (2011-2014), the Harvard Law School's Shareholder Rights Project (SRP) operated a clinical program assisting institutional investors on board declassification proposals. This paper analyzes the SRP as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the value implications of...