In the United States, the representation of women on corporate boards of directors has been flat for 6 years now. By contrast, elsewhere around the world the topic is a hot button issue. This includes Australia where the proportion of board seats held by women has suddenly jumped from 8% in 2010...

Since my books on the role of women appeared, in 2007 and in 2010, the participation by women in corporate governance has become a front page issue in many European nations, including Norway, Spain, and France, which have adopted quota laws, and in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, which may...

Gender diversity on corporate boards is a popular topic both in academic and in business publications, but the focus is typically on ‘how' rather than ‘why'. This paper argues that the motivation for seeking to increase the number of women on boards necessarily affects the means of achieving...

For most of the twentieth century the conventional wisdom held — probably correctly — that shareholders in America's large corporations were passive and powerless and that real power in a public corporation was wielded by its managers. Beginning in the 1980s, however, shareholders in the...

Most directors and senior managers of UK companies would likely regard it as trite law that, in undertaking their managerial and/or control functions, they are accountable first and foremost to their employer firm's general body of shareholders. It follows that the interests of other corporate...

In this manuscript, I examine the firm's ex ante cost of equity capital in the quarter before and the quarter after the filing of a shareholder securities lawsuit as well as in the quarter before and the quarter after the final resolution of the shareholder lawsuit. I find that the adjustment in...

Well-constructed, country-specific “corporate governance indices” can predict higher firm values in emerging markets. However, there is little credible research on which aspects of governance drive that overall relationship. We study that question across four major emerging markets (Brazil,...

In recent years there have been two parallel discussions taking place in the US and in the UK about the role which institutional shareholders should play in governing the corporation. In the US this discussion is around the idea of shareholder empowerment, in the UK it is around shareholder...

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between corporate governance, measured by Corporate Governance Index (CGI), and firm's performance and dividend payouts during the financial crisis in Poland. The empirical approach in the study lies in constructing a comprehensive measures of the...

There is a host of literature on governance models, stakeholder protection, best practices in board constitution and its processes, the equations between the board and the operating executive management, and so on. What is less known is the fact that our own ancient texts have laid down sound...