The European Shareholder Rights Directive provides shareholders the right to ask questions related to the items on the agenda. The company can refuse to answer the questions in a limited number of cases. After a brief historical and European view, the second part of the paper assesses the...

Chinese listed firms recruit independent directors in order to build up connections with people who can provide useful sources and/or protection rather than for their monitoring of top managements. It is found that Chinese listed firms particularly prefer two types of Guanxi provided by...

In the context of corporate governance reforms following the global financial crisis, policymakers have focused on how to reduce the bank manager' incentives to take risks in order to promote financial stability. On both sides of the Atlantic, legislation seeks to pursue this goal by enhancing...

This paper studies the effects of interlocked boards of directors on voluntary disclosures, governance practices and earnings quality. The Canadian environment, where director interlocks are prevalent, is examined. A checklist of twenty voluntary disclosure measures from proxy statements is...

We examine the certification and resignation decisions of independent directors in China, and provide evidence on the relative influence that social, political and reputational factors have on the decisions of independent directors in the presence of private information about future adverse...

This paper examines board structure and the effect of board size and composition on firm value for firms in high technology industries for the period 1995-2008. I find that high-tech firms, generally characterized by asymmetric information and growth opportunities, have board sizes 2.9% smaller...

Existing literature on the evaluation of the economic consequences of board reforms has some limitations including: their estimation results fail to show the causal effects of the regulatory reforms; they have limited policy implications for an economy where family businesses are dominant; and...

The theoretical predictions about the net impact of board network on firm performance are ambiguous and the issue becomes even more complex in emerging economies characterized by concentrated ownership structure and dominated by business group firms. This paper empirically analyzes the effect of...

We adopt a novel approach to explain why firms opt for or against CEO duality and the value implications of this choice. Exploiting the 2009 amendments to Regulation S-K, we provide unique evidence on the first-time disclosure of the reasons firms state for combining (separating) the roles of...

We use hand-collected board data around the issuance of two distinct government-led board structure mandates in the U.K. to establish the effect of outside directors on acquirer performance. Increases in outside director representation are associated with better acquirer returns in deals...