Institutional investors are highly dissatisfied with the quality of information that they receive about corporate governance policies and practices in the annual proxy. Across the board, they want proxies to be shorter, more concise, more candid, and less legal. The largest complaint involves...

We examine the effectiveness of institutional investors in constraining aggressive earnings management induced by strong contractual incentives. To this end we focus on the consequences of earnings-related promises (covenants) negotiated between corporate controlling shareholders and minority...

Theories of delegated monitoring predict that when public disclosure is costly, monitoring by a large investor leads management to supply more private information to that investor, and less public disclosure to other similarly aligned investors who free-ride off the monitor. We test this...

Large shareholders are a potentially very important element of firms’ corporate governance system. Whereas analytical research is typically vague on who these large shareholders are, in practice there are important variations in the types of large owners (and the different types of large...

The subprime crisis led to a wave of government interventions in the private sector that has been particularly strong in Europe and Latin America, where several governments are large shareholders in a variety of public firms. In a sense, the subprime crisis induced these governments to behave as...

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...

This study investigated companies publicly listed in Taiwan from 2002 to 2010 to examine whether independent directors improve the quality of earnings and analyzed whether the control rights of a controlling shareholder mitigate the impact of independent directors on earnings quality. Empirical...

Exploiting staggered adoption of the universal demand (UD) laws by 23 states between 1989 and 2005 that makes filing shareholder derivative litigations more difficult, we show that reduced litigation threats improve corporate takeover efficiency. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we...

The regulation of hostile takeovers constitutes an interesting corporate governance microcosm. It is an area where clear contrasts in approach, regarding the balance of power between shareholders and the board of directors, are evident across different jurisdictions. Takeovers also reflect the...

This article is published in a special symposium edition on the work of Adolf Berle, which includes papers from a conference, In Berle's Footsteps, held in November 2009 to celebrate the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society.Shareholders, and the relationship...