We examine the determinants of equity ownership by outside directors as well as the relationship between ownership and operating performance. Unlike previous studies of equity ownership by directors, we use hand-collected data on firm-level policies requiring director ownership for S&P 500 firms...

This paper studies the interactions between monitoring choices in different firms. Shareholders gather information about a common industry shock and subsequently intervene with management. An information externality arises because intervention transmits information about industry conditions to...

Will corporations hedge even if risk management does not raise firm value? We address this question by examining theoretically and empirically the effects of CEO entrenchment and overinvestment on corporate hedging. Our theoretical analysis indicates that the avoidance of financial distress...

This study examines the impact of the quality of corporate governance, as measured by a specially constructed corporate governance index, on the expected cost of equity calculated using the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) approach. A total of 114 listed companies were investigated to analyze...

Due to the numerous corporate scandals during the late 90s, in September 2001 the German Ministry of Justice appointed the "Government Commission German Corporate Governance Code" to develop a code of best practice. The first version of the German Corporate Governance Code was passed at February...

This report updates and expands earlier studies to look at the profitability of $349.7 billion of buybacks executed from 2000 through early 2010 by a sample of 275 corporations. The sample companies, drawn mainly from the technology sector, enjoy total equity market value today of $945.6...

Motivated by agency theory, this study investigates how staggered boards influence accounting discretion. The results indicate that staggered boards do affect accounting discretion. In fact, the impact of staggered boards on accounting discretion is substantially larger (about seven times...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

This paper examines how accounting transparency and corporate governance interact. Firms with better governance are associated with higher abnormal returns, but even more so if they also have higher transparency. The effect is largely monotonic — it is small and insignificant for opaque firms...

The paper investigates the determinants of bank board structure in Ghana and finds that the Scope of Operations Hypothesis could explain the variation in board size but not board independence. On the other hand, the Board Monitoring Hypothesis could only explain the variation in board...