When Parmalat Finanziaria SpA filed for bankruptcy protection in late December 2003, it was regarded as the biggest financial collapse in European corporate history and was quickly dubbed 'Europe's Enron'. The collapse of Parmalat provides an ideal opportunity to examine the Italian corporate...

In the past decade, as a result of many interrelated changes in the economic environment, the role and the pressures on the corporate governance of firms have been significantly transformed in the US and the UK. To test the magnitude of this changed environment, we study one aspect of corporate...

We study, for the first time, whether and how directors' and officers' (D&O) insurance affects independent directors' voting. We provide new evidence that D&O insurance through the insurance channel and the insurance-monitoring channel incentivizes independent directors to monitor. The positive...

Regulators and governance activists are pressuring firms to abolish CEO duality (the Chief Executive Officer is also the Chairman of the Board). However, the literature provides mixed evidence on the relation between CEO duality and firm performance. Using the exogenous shock of the 1989...