Over time, the development and refinement of corporate governance standards and recommendations have often been the consequence of corporate governance failures. Even if the collapse of Enron and the like, may not have been caused by corporate governance failures in a strict sense, there were...

We use a historical experiment to test whether U.S. corporate defined benefit pension plans strategically use regulatory freedom to lower the reported value of pension liabilities, and hence required cash contributions. For some years, pension plans were required to estimate two liabilities -...

In the year 2009, then Chairman, Satyam Computers Limited (hereafter Satyam Computers), India confessed to financial irregularities leading to a series of grave felonies including financial and securities fraud of massive proportion. In his statement he confessed that the misstatement in the...

We study compliance of Indian firms to the 2013 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) regulation that mandates qualifying firms to spend 2 percent of the pre-tax profits on CSR. We demonstrate that the formation of CSR committees and the appointment of directors with relevant experience...

In mid-September 2008, a global financial crisis erupted which was followed by the most serious worldwide economic recession for decades. As in many other regions of the world, governments in the euro area stepped in with a wide range of emergency measures to stabilise the financial sector and...

In the past decades many European countries implemented numerical fiscal rules in order to strengthen fiscal discipline on all levels of government. This development was intensified by the financial crisis in 2008. Although plenty of research points to the discipline-enhancing effect of these...

The need for reform of the regulation and design of workplace pensions for Canadians sparked three major provincial reviews by Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, and Nova Scotia between November 2008 and January 2009. While Canadians with incomes below half the average wage are generally...

We investigate the extent to which regulations governing investment, valuation and funding affect the riskiness of defined benefit pension funds' asset allocations. We compare the regulatory frameworks of public, corporate and industry pension funds in the United States, Canada and the...

We investigate the influence of investment regulations on the riskiness and procyclicality of defined-benefit (DB) pension funds' asset allocations. We provide a global comparison of the regulatory framework for public, corporate and industry pension funds in the US, Canada and the Netherlands....

This working paper, which will appear as a chapter of Framing the Social Security Debate (forthcoming Fall 1998) (Brookings Institution Press), discusses two regulatory problems associated with the privatization of social security: first, the risk that political interference with social security...