This essay on Corporations is a chapter in an upcoming volume on economic theology edited by Stefan Schwarzkopf.The secular study of corporations has long regularly focused on three sets of concerns: (1) Is the idea of corporate “personhood” only a convenient shorthand for a complex set of...

Research on the nature and value of firms’ dynamic capabilities has produced contradictory propositions and findings. Scholars have argued that contingency theorizing has the potential to improve our understanding, as the context in which dynamic capabilities are deployed may affect their...

The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about the governance of banks. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing board governance using a sample of banking firm data that spans forty years. We examine the relationship between board structure (size and...

The recent global financial crisis contributes for recognizing the importance of corporate governance mechanisms in the banking industry. Although mixed evidence is associated with the role of board of directors in non-financial industries, a few analyses have been made of the relation between...

The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about bank governance. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing the relationship between board governance and performance using a sample of banking firm data that spans 34 years. We find that board independence is...

Consistent with the view that “busy” analysts face time and effort constraints in monitoring firms, we find that higher busyness lowers firm valuation. The underlying mechanisms include lower operating performance, higher cost of capital, greater earnings management, excessive CEO...

We study the effect of corporate board structure on firm performance under different product market conditions. Using customer-supplier links to identify exogenous downstream demand shocks, we find that board independence has a more significant effect on firm performance when the firm-specific...

We propose a new determinant of firm value within a business group: controlling shareholders' value (CSV), the value of controlling shareholders' stake in an affiliate divided by their stake in all affiliates. We posit that controlling shareholders focus attention on the high-CSV affiliates....

This paper provides new evidence on the structure, dynamics and performance effects of corporate boards in publicly traded companies in Russia. It takes advantage of a new and unique longitudinal dataset of virtually all Russian companies whose shares were traded in the RTS/MICEX/MOEX over...

The choice of legal form affects many aspects of the company's operation and is one of the key decisions that an entrepreneur must make. In this article, we conduct a comparative analysis of six legal forms of companies in terms of efficiency, indebtedness, growth and risk. Based on 72,596...