Most of the literature on corporate governance emphasizes that firms should be run in the interests of shareholders. This is an appropriate objective function when markets are perfect and complete. In many emerging economies this is not the case: markets are imperfect and incomplete. The first theme of the paper is that alternative firm objective functions, such as pursuing the interests of all...

This paper examines how external governance pressure provided by both the product market and the market for corporate control affects a borrowing firm’s choice of debt source. Using reductions in import tariffs to capture exogenous changes in a firm’s competitive environment, we find that increased product market competition has a significant negative impact on a firm’s reliance on bank debt fi...

In this paper, we examine the universality of “good” corporate governance practices as exemplified by the Anglo-American governance paradigm. Using a new database from Governance Metrics International featuring highly granular measures of corporate governance practices across a large number of countries for the period 2006-2011, we first find that the national cultural dimension of individualis...

This paper investigates the variation in contagion effect of corporate scandals on peers firms with different corporate governance quality. We find that better corporate governance reduces investors’ uncertainty about a firm’s fundamental value and alleviates the contagion effect of scandals. Specifically, the empirical results show that external governance, ownership structure and external aud...

15 From its inception, the institutional tradition of studying organizations has been informed by themes of control and coordination – themes that fall within the domain of corporate governance, broadly defined as being concerned with the implicit and explicit relationships between the corporation and its constituents, as well as the relationships between these constituent groups 1999). With it...

The fallout of the Enron debacle spurred legislative and regulatory activity aimed at strengthening corporate governance and preventing another corporate implosion. Confronting shattered investor confidence, Congress responded to these corporate governance fiascos by enacting the now infamous Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), meanwhile, called on the self...

This article has two related tasks. First, we review the articles published in this Special Issue on Corporate Control, Mergers, and Acquisitions. These articles provide new evidence on several aspects of corporate control and governance including the value and performance effects of various ownership groups, the impact of internal governance structures, the effects of regulatory changes on spe...

Recent research studying the link between law and finance has concentrated on country-level investor protection measures and focused on differences in legal systems across countries and legal families. We use recent data on firm-level corporate governance rankings across 14 emerging markets and find that there is wide variation in firm-level governance across countries in our sample and that th...

Established firms often face significant obstacles to innovation. As a solution, it has been suggested to form corporate ventures. Based on a sample of corporate and independent ventures in German manufacturing, we show that corporate ventures are more innovative than the control group of independent ventures. In particular, corporate ventures are more successful at developing radical innovatio...