We investigate the agency costs of corporate ownership structure and the role of audit committees in mitigating their effect. Using China as a laboratory, where audit committees are voluntary, we study the demand for and value relevance of audit committees conditional on the various agency costs of corporate ownership. Audit committees complement existing internal governance systems by reducing...

We set out to shed light on three conundrums that exist in the literature on investment: why do investments out of different sources of finance earn different returns, why do different studies report different patterns of returns, and why do companies in developing countries make greater use of external capital to finance their investment than do companies in developed countries? To answer the ...

As the REIT regime has been expanding globally, corporate governance practices in emerging REIT markets have become a major concern for domestic and international investors alike. Idiosyncrasies stemming from the ownership models applied in Asian economies and the fact Asian REITs are often externally managed “captive entities” make issues pertaining to corporate governance of the listed real e...

Corporate governance can be defined to be an institution that constrains relations between corporate managers and various stakeholders, including shareholders, creditors, workers, suppliers, and customers. Under this broad definition, corporate governance is a system of various sub-systems that are complementary to one another. This paper focuses on two subsystems of the Japanese corporate gove...

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...

he topic of corporate governance in general, and topmanagement compensation in particular, has received enormous attention in recent years.1 Although an increasing literature has examined various aspects of the corporate governance of manufacturing firms in the United States and abroad, the corporate governance of banks and financial institutions has received relatively less focus. Alignment of...

The post-Apartheid South African corporate governance (CG) model is a unique hybridisation of the traditional Anglo-American and Continental European-Asian CG models, distinctively requiring firms to explicitly comply with a number of affirmative action and stakeholder CG provisions, such as black economic empowerment, employment equity, environment, HIV/Aids, and health and safety. This paper ...

Building on prior research on how boards should provide stakeholder transparency by disclosing on how their organizations are governing their IT assets, this paper provides an exploratory insight in the contemporary state of IT governance transparency in Belgian and South African companies. Specifically, the influence of the national corporate governance code on IT governance transparency is in...

We compare the impact of mandatory against voluntary ownership transfer on stock price informativeness using the unique research setting provided by the Split Share Structure Reform in China. Ownership transfers from state to private entity are expected to improve corporate governance, which in turn reduce managerial incentives to withhold value-relevant information to outside investor. However...

The post-Apartheid South African corporate governance (CG) model is a unique hybridisation of the traditional Anglo-American and Continental European-Asian CG models, distinctively requiring firms to explicitly comply with a number of affirmative action and stakeholder CG provisions, such as black economic empowerment, employment equity, environment, HIV/Aids, and health and safety. This paper ...