Board composition is central to the worldwide corporate governance reforms that have taken place in recent years. The strong emphasis on director independence and board leadership is now part of all corporate governance regimes, including the regimes which has been introduced in Malaysia. It is...

This study examines changes in block ownership for a large sample of listed and non-listed German firms. The frequency of block trading is similar to other countries, and the vast majority of block trades leads to changes in ultimate ownership (control transfers). Such changes are more likely...

This study provides new stylized facts on the determinants of corporate failure and acquisition in Germany. It also offers important lessons for the design of empirical studies. We show that firms experiencing failure or acquisition are significantly different from surviving firms on a number of...

The analysis of the factors of corporate governance is divided into four thematic sections. In the first part corporate governance is defined as part of the broader economic context. The second part deals with the principles of corporate governance. In the third part, the relation between the...

In emerging markets, the deviation between the ultimate controlling shareholders' voting rights and their cash flow rights (hereafter “DVC”) in the listed firms is quite prevalent. DVC could be introduced due to the ultimate controlling shareholders' opportunistic incentives, as well as by...

This study provides new evidence on the relation between institutional ownership and the equity incentives provided to CEOs by their portfolio holdings of stock and stock options. We show that when firms' CEOs have abnormally high equity incentives, higher institutional ownership is associated...

Agency problems may arise from the separation of ownership and management (Type I) or from conflicts of interest between controlling and non-controlling shareholders (Type II). In this study, we investigate whether the relation between corporate governance and firm performance depends on the...

We analyze the distributional properties of ownership concentration measures and find that measures come from different underlying statistical distributions. Consistent with theory, some measures that are classified to represent a monitoring dimension have a positive influence on firm performance;...

The ongoing controversy over Melrose’s purchase of engineering company GKN illustrates many common misunderstandings about how free markets can work to the benefit of all. Shareholders, not politicians, should decide how to run their businesses, including whether a new management team could do...

We evaluate how the productive structure and level of specialization of a hospital affect technical efficiency by analyzing a six-year panel database (2000/2005) drawn from hospital discharge records and Ministry of Health data. We adopt a distance function approach, while measuring the...