Title : Corporate governance , value and performance of firms : New empirical results on convergence from a large international database

This paper aims to revisit the link between corporate governance, value, and firm performance by focusing on convergence, understood as the way that non-US firms are adopting US best practice in terms of corporate governance, and the implications of this adoption. We examine theoretical questions related to conventional models (agency theory, transaction cost economics, new property rights theory),which tend to suggest rational adoption of best practice, and contributions that alternatively consider countryand firm-level differences as possible barriers to convergence. We contribute to the empirical literature by using a large international database to show how non-US firms’ adoption of US best practice is having an impact on performance.