The global financial crisis of 2008 has stimulated the debate on corporate governance and shareholder protection. The intuitive reason for the topicality of shareholder protection is that insolvencies mainly harm shareholders as the companies' residual claimants. In addition, ideally,...

This is a draft chapter for a forthcoming volume, The Research Handbook on Shareholder Power, edited by Randall Thomas and Jennifer Hill (Cheltenham:Edward Elgar). This chapter describes the experience with activist institutional investors in an apparently unfavorable corporate environment...

From the start of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) "corporatization" project in the late 1980s, a Chinese corporate governance regime subject to increasingly enabling legal norms has been determined by mandatory regulations imposed by the PRC securities regulator, the China Securities...

We study the governance choices of firms in a voluntary regulatory regime where we can directly observe the impact of ownership on corporate governance practices pertaining to the composition of the board of directors. We find that firms with a dominant shareholder are more likely to deviate...

This paper examines minority squeeze-outs and their regulation in Germany, a country where majority shareholders have extensively used this tool since its introduction in 2002. Using unique data on court rulings and compensations, we analyze a sample of 324 squeeze-outs of publicly listed...

The forthright brand of shareholder activism hedge funds deploy became during the 2000s a significant feature of Canadian corporate governance. This paper examines hedge fund activism “Canadian style.” The paper characterizes the interventions hedge funds specialize in as “offensive”...

The brand of shareholder activism associated with hedge funds is a highly topical, yet equally controversial issue. In this article, I provide a synthesis of the key issues surrounding the hedge fund activism phenomenon, many of which are unresolved or have become popularized notions. I focus on...

In the last decade, the balance of power between shareholders and boards has shifted dramatically. Changes in both the marketplace and the legal landscape governing it have turned the call for empowered shareholders into a new reality. Correspondingly, the authority that boards of directors have...

CEO duality is a contentious issue driving much debate amongst regulators and business leaders. It is also an aspect of corporate governance, to which insurance companies have made significant changes in recent years. Despite its significance, we know little about the determinants of CEO duality...