Institutional shareholders around the world increasingly use share-voting to protect their portfolio investments and improve corporate governance. However, exercising voting rights involves costly and often arcane country-specific legal rules. Efforts are under way to harmonize cross-border...

Hong Kong leads the rank tables as an international financial centre. However, the data indicate that some parts of her corporate governance arrangements probably detract from - rather than contribute to - that leading position. In this brief, we show how excessive shareholding concentration,...

We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their re-election to express displeasure over the directors'...

Equity ownership in the United States no longer reflects the dispersed share ownership of the canonical Berle-Means firm. Instead, we observe the reconcentration of ownership in the hands of institutional investment intermediaries, which gives rise to what we call “the agency costs of agency...

Performance pay, at least as usually understand, is no good idea for non-executive directors. They have to supervise and control or in some situations even to fire and replace the executive managers. This means that their performance as supervisors is totally different from the performance of...

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court...

This report evaluates the corporate governance practices of Colombian SOEs against the OECD Guidelines on Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). The assessment was prepared based on information provided by the Colombian authorities, an analysis of the available literature and...

Shareholder voting on corporate acquisitions is controversial. In most countries acquisition decisions are delegated to boards and shareholder approval is discretionary, which makes existing empirical studies inconclusive. We study the U.K. setting where shareholder approval is imposed...

During the recent financial crisis, there was a dramatic spike, across all industries, in the volatility of individual firm share prices after adjustment for movements in the market as a whole. In this Article, we demonstrate that a similar spike has occurred with each major downturn in the...

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....