Corporate Governance is seen as a set of systems, rules, regulations that are in place in order to keep the company on a straight path and to give assurance to the shareholders that their investment is well protected. One of the instruments that are at the choice of the shareholders is the Board...

Financial scandals of the last decade have had a negative effect upon the trust and perception of investors regarding auditor responsibility, firm performance and their part in fraud and error detection. The audit firms play an important role in the capital markets by verifying that auditors...

Integrating corporate governance into brand management is fundamental for protecting shareholders, considering the increasing importance of brands in firms’ performance and the dissociation between shareholders and managers in most large and medium firms. This paper designs a corporate...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows than UK and US firms.However, on a published profits basis, the pattern is reversed.Company law provisions and accounting policies account for these conflicting results.A partial adjustment model is used to estimate the implicit target...

We investigate patterns of abnormal stock performance around insider trades and option exercises on the Dutch market. Listed firms in the Netherlands have a long tradition of employing many anti-shareholder mechanisms limiting shareholders rights. Our results imply that insider transactions are...

Traditionally share price returns and their variance have been explained by factors linked to the operations of the company such as systematic risk, corporate size and P/E ratios or by factors related to the influence of the macro-economic environment. In these models, the institutional...

This study investigates the impact of corporate governance and product market competition on total factor productivity growth for two large samples of German and UK firms. In poorly performing UK firms, the presence of strong outside blockholders lead to substantial increases in productivity....

This paper analyses the control of Belgian listed companies. The analysis reveals that control of listed companies in Belgium is highly concentrated. Business groups, holding companies, and voting pacts, play an important role in bringing about this concentration. The main characteristics of the...

This study has analysed the share price reactions to changes in top management.A distinction was made among different types of CEO turnover: forced resignation, voluntary departures and age-related retirements.The announcement of a forced CEO resignation is hailed favourably by the market with a...