The Sarbanes-Oxley Act represented a major legislative action designed to increase transparency and accountability in U.S. corporations. Within the context of agency theory and corporate governance, the expectation is that the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley impacted the agency relationship of firms and hence affected the corporate governance structure. With these changes, the question arises as to...

This chapter surveys the theoretical and empirical research on the main mechanisms of corporate law and governance, discusses the main legal and regulatory institutions in different countries, and examines the comparative governance literature. Corporate governance is concerned with the reconciliation of conflicts of interest between various corporate claimholders and the resolution of collecti...

We examine the effect of corporate governance on the use of dividends and repurchases, composition of payout, and inclusion of a pre-commitment feature in the payout policy. We find that dividend payout is decreasing in governance quality. Corporate governance has a mixed effect on repurchases: good external governance prompts managers to repurchase more and to use repurchases as the only form ...

The French adoption of a corporate board quota for women reflects Europe's increasingly stakeholder-oriented approach to corporate governance, one that stands in marked contrast with that of the United States. This Article discusses how the corporate board quota will shift French and European corporate governance. The change accentuates an already established stakeholder corporate culture wides...

The goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of corporate governance in China. We examine corporate governance as it has evolved with China’s economic reform and how it has been influenced by laws and regulations, politics, and Chinese culture. The paper focuses predominantly on corporate governance in publicly listed state-owned enterprises. Many problems in the current corporate governanc...

We analyze the impact of factors related to corporate governance (i.e., compensation, monitoring, and ownership structure) on risk taking in the insurance industry. We measure asset, product, and financial risk in insurance companies and employ a structural equation model in which corporate governance is modeled as latent factor. Based on this model, we present empirical evidence on the link be...

In this paper, we provide a preliminary survey of the burgeoning literature on corporate governance in China. We structure the existing research around three themes: (1) What are the current corporate governance practices in China? (2) How do these corporate governance practices affect Chinese firms’ valuation and various corporate policies? (3) How does China’s unique institutional setting pre...

In this paper, we provide new and complementing international evidence on the relation between cash holdings, corporate governance, and firm value. Our sample consists of a crosssection of 1,875 firms from 46 countries in 2007. We construct eight different measures of firm-level corporate governance based on 64 individual governance attributes provided by Governance Metrics International (GMI)....

In this paper we review some of the initial ideologies regarding corporate governance, focusing in particular on the in the literature dominating Principal-Agent-Approach. We detail the implied assumptions and the thereof resulting consequences for corporate governance, including some resulting inconsistencies. Overall, we find that in the to principal-agent-conflict is rarely defined with the ...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of the Netherlands’ private sector initiative on selfregulation to improve corporate governance. We compare corporate governance characteristics and the relation between firm value and these characteristics before and after the private sector initiative. We find that the recommendations of the private sector initiative had no substantive effect on corporate...