Businesses fail – some spectacularly and suddenly, others more gradually over time. In some companies business decline can be turned around or at least delayed. In many others there is no option other than business closure. Over the past twenty years the rate of business failure has...

Das Pfadabhängigkeitstheorem hat sich zu einem wichtigen Erklärungskonzept der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung entwickelt. Jürgen Beyer führt die theoretische Debatte fort, indem er auf die Vielzahl möglicher Mechanismen hinweist, die einerseits institutionelle Kontinuität sichern...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

We report on the current state and important older findings of empirical studies on corporate credit ratings and their relationship to ratings of other entities. Specifically, we consider the results of three lines of research: The correlation of credit ratings and corporate default, the...

This paper investigates the design of a leniency policy to fight corporate crime. We explicitly take into account the agency problem within the firm. We model this through a three-tier hierarchy: authority, shareholder, and manager. The manager may breach the law and report evidence to the...

In this paper, we provide an outlook for further research on the topic of governance. We review four different approaches on the theory of the firm and discuss implications for governance, namely; nexus of contracts / agency theory, property rights / incomplete contracts, adaption, and nexus of...