Pragmatic and effective research on corporate governance often turns critically on appreciating the legal institutions surrounding corporate entities—yet such nuances are often unfamiliar or poorly specified to economists and other social scientists without legal training. This chapter...

Outside directors of public companies play a central role in overseeing management. Nonetheless, they have rarely incurred personal, out-of-pocket liability for failing to carry out their assigned tasks, either in the litigation-prone United States or other countries. Historically, as threats to...

Privatisation is the major component in all the transition processes carried out in the Central and East European countries. With different pace and scale across the counties, it took distinct, sometimes even opposing forms. The volume presents the results from a comparative research on mass...

Purpose – Legislators legislate, but how feasible and effective the implementation and enforcement of these laws are and how congruent with the countries characteristics, is under doubt. The paper seeks to argue that the Greek law on corporate governance (CG) had no effect on the fundamental...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on a number of governance and governance-related characteristics, such as board structure and committee composition, as well as the effect of those changes (if any) on both accounting...

The paper is based on building up a Matrix of concurrence – a specially devised in-strument using in details the OECD Principles, White book and the two ROSCs for Cor¬po¬rate Governance in Bulgaria. It gives an opportunity to evaluate the degree of concur¬rence of Bulgarian code to the...

We show that public companies frequently changed their board structures before implementation of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, with two-thirds of firms changing board size or independence during an average two-year period. Board changes were associated with changes in firm-specific fundamentals, but...

Regulators and governance activists are pressuring firms to abolish CEO duality (the Chief Executive Officer is also the Chairman of the Board). However, the literature provides mixed evidence on the relation between CEO duality and firm performance. Using the exogenous shock of the 1989...

We provide the first comprehensive and robust evidence on the relationship between board independence and firm performance in China. We find that independent directors have an overall positive effect on firm operating performance in China. Our findings are robust to a battery of tests, including...

This paper examines why CFOs become involved in material accounting manipulations. We find that while CFOs bear substantial legal costs when involved in accounting manipulations, these CFOs have similar equity incentives to the CFOs of matched non-manipulation firms. In contrast, CEOs of...