Non-financial performance measures, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) measures, are potentially leading indicators of firms' financial performance. I draw on the prior academic literature and the concept of ESG materiality to develop new corporate governance and ESG...

Firstly, this paper brings forth an encompassing definition of investment funds intended to track down some patterns of deviant governance. Secondly, it will focus on three conspicuous types among those funds: banks, mutual funds, and hedge funds. Such approach seeks to reveal deep similarities...

In recent years, activist hedge funds have spread from the United States to other countries in Europe and Asia, but not as a duplicate of the American practice. Rather, there is a considerable diversity in the incidence and the nature of activist hedge fund campaigns around the world. What...

Shareholder activism has sharply increased over the past decade and spread both across countries and among different types of investors. Today, 50% of all engagements occur outside North America, with non-hedge fund investors accounting for one-third of all engagements. We investigate the...

In this paper, we analyse whether bank owners or bank managers were the driving force behind the risks incurred in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. We show that owner controlled banks had higher profits in the years before the crisis, and incurred larger losses and were more likely...

To gain insights about the quality of board's firing decisions, we investigate abnormal stock returns and operating performance around CEO-turnover announcements in a new hand-collected sample of 208 "clean" turnover events between January 1998 and June 2009. Unlike the majority of previous...

This paper examines the stock price reaction to cross-border spinoff announcements and investigates whether country characteristics (such as takeover market liquidity and investor protection) cause variation in the announcements' wealth effects. We observe a positive and significant price...

Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is motivated by increasing shareholder value through improved corporate governance. Therefore, stronger corporate governance can reduce the returns from M&A activity, including M&A foreign direct investment (FDI). This, in turn, can reduce the returns from...

We investigate whether the separation between ownership and control rights can be costly to controlling shareholders and firms in terms of capital-raising costs. Using estimates of the cost of equity capital implied by analyst earnings forecasts and growth rate for a sample of 1,207 firms from...