There are two main sources of confusion in the public corporate governance debate. One is the confusion about the role of public policy intervention. The other is a lack of empirical knowledge about the corporate landscape where rules are supposed to be implemented and the functioning of...

This paper provides a framework for analysing the character and degree of ownership engagement by institutional investors. It argues that the general term “institutional investor” in itself doesn’t say very much about the quality or degree of ownership engagement. It is therefore an...

This paper presents a simple model for dual-class stock shares, in which common shareholders receive both public and private cash flows (i.e. dividends and any private benefit of holding voting rights) and preferred shareholders only receive public cash flows (i.e. dividends). The dual-class...

The legal environment is one important determinant of corporate governance. However, within legal families, also cultural differences can explain the level of corporate governance to some extent. We analyze this relationship for the case of Switzerland. Swiss firms are mainly located in two...

This paper examines the effect of ownership structure on the market assessment of asset sales. Three types of ownership structures are identified: large block outside, inside, and widely held. Empirical results indicate that firms with large block outside shareholders experience significantly...

While bankers and brokers remain everyone's favorite culprits for causing the great financial crisis two years ago, a less likely suspect - the institutional investor community - is increasingly coming under scrutiny for passive corporate governance and a focus on short-term returns that enabled...

Income smoothing is a longstanding practice under the more general category of earnings management. As the name suggests, it consists of smoothing out the fluctuations of the income series. This article examines the association between the ownership and control structure, level of corporate...

We study the benefits of opening up local equity markets to foreign institutional investors using data on Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) in China around the reform floating non-tradable shares. We find evidence supporting the view (Stulz (1999)) that as “outsiders,”...

Executive compensation in the U.S. banking industry has been criticized as a root cause of the recent financial crisis. This study examines the relationship between executive compensation, ownership structure, and firm performance for Chinese financial corporations during 2001-2009. The results...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 1993 to 2007. We find that the level of cash holdings declines as state ownership increases. This negative relation is attributable to the soft-budget constraint (SBC) inherent in state...