Understanding the role of culture in corporate governance has become a subject of growing importance. Today, no institutional analysis of corporate governance systems would be complete without considering the cultural environment in which such systems are embedded. This paper provides an...

We investigate say-on-pay (SOP) voting outcomes in a country (Italy) where ownership structure is concentrated by regressing shareholder dissent on a comprehensive set of independent variables (spanning from remuneration structure and disclosure to corporate governance), coming from the Italian...

The global financial crisis of 2008 has stimulated the debate on corporate governance and shareholder protection. The intuitive reason for the topicality of shareholder protection is that insolvencies mainly harm shareholders as the companies' residual claimants. In addition, ideally,...

The claim that institutions matter for economic growth and development has so far received a more extensive theoretical treatment than an empirical or methodological one. Basing our approach on a coevolutionary conception of relations between law and the economy, we link theory to method and...

CEO duality is a contentious issue driving much debate amongst regulators and business leaders. It is also an aspect of corporate governance, to which insurance companies have made significant changes in recent years. Despite its significance, we know little about the determinants of CEO duality...

Today's public company executives face a considerably different set of opportunities and constraints than their counterparts from the managerial capitalism era, which reached its apex in the 1950s and 1960s. The growing prominence of corporate governance played a significant role in this...

Institutional investors are often criticized for their insufficient "engagement" with listed companies. Actually, information and other transaction costs limit their capacity to actively monitor investee firms, and to engage with their management. A partial solution is offered by Proxy Advisors...

Gender diversity on corporate boards is a popular topic both in academic and in business publications, but the focus is typically on ‘how' rather than ‘why'. This paper argues that the motivation for seeking to increase the number of women on boards necessarily affects the means of achieving...

Notwithstanding the focus on hedge fund activism, fundamental questions remain. How much does hedge fund activism really matter? What has academic study contributed to the understanding of hedge fund activism? And what, if anything, does research on hedge fund activism illuminate about the...

After the financial crisis, there has been considerable debate about the role of corporations in society. It has become broadly accepted that corporations - particularly the world's largest publicly traded corporations – need to be governed with respect for the society and the environment....