We analyse the structure of corporate boards in Japan to determine whether they are matched to each firm's specific needs. Consistent with US findings, our results show that board size is positively related to firm size and firm complexity, and negatively related to monitoring costs. However,...

Divestitures have the potential to create shareholder value by helping firms optimize their portfolio of assets. Even so, firms do not necessarily take up divestitures because of agency problems. In fact, large controlling shareholders may prefer to extract private benefits of control at the...

We examine the influence of ownership concentration on payout policy in Japan. According to the monitoring hypothesis, large shareholders prefer higher dividends to mitigate the agency cost of free cash flows. In contrast, the rent extraction hypothesis assumes that large shareholders derive...

We investigate the role of multiple large shareholders (MLS) in corporate risk-taking. Using a sample of publicly listed French family firms over the period 2003-2012, we show that the presence, number, and voting power of MLS are associated with higher risk-taking. Our results suggest that MLS...