In Shamir’s ( ) t n , threshold of the secret sharing scheme, a secret s is divided into n shares by a dealer and is shared among n shareholders in such a way that (a) the secret can be reconstructed when there are t or more than t shares; and (b) the secret cannot be obtained when there are fewer than t shares. In the secret reconstruction, participating users can be either legitimate sharehol...

Article history: Received 17 June 2013 Received in revised form 9 December 2013 Accepted 8 April 2014 Available online 29 October 2014 Using data on China's split-share structure reform that floats non-tradable shares, we find that Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) have greater influence over the controlling state shareholders than localmutual funds. QFIIs are less prone to poli...

The purpose of this article is to review the results of research papers conducted in the area of foreign ownership impact on company's performance and to highlight the specifics of this linkage in the environment of transition economies. Several authors have documented greater efficiency of private companies compared to state-owned. According to different studies, an alternative option for tran...

Labor union shareholders have become increasingly vocal in matters of corporate governance, however, their motives have been subject to much debate in the academic literature and business press. I examine the proxy votes of AFL-CIO pension funds in director elections of 504 companies from 2003 to 2006. Using the 2005 AFL-CIO breakup as a source of exogenous variation in the union affiliations o...

Controversy over auditor independence has raged in recent times, but little is known about what auditor independence means to the ultimate consumers of the auditors work. In New Zealand, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand (called ICANZ) has held an inquiry into the issue (ICANZ, 2002, 2003), the New Zealand Stock Exchange has made changes to its listing requirements (NZX 2004...

The most influential theory of corporate governance, principal agency theory, does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the interests of top management and directors should be increasingly aligned to shareholder interests by making the bo...

In competitive economies with private firm ownership, incomplete markets, and firm shareholders changing over time, several firm objectives have been proposed. Some are useful to understand efficiency of equilibria, and others are explicitly consistent with majority shareholder control or collective choice rules, but it is not always clear if versions of each type are consistent with versions o...

This thesis extends the literature on the role of state ownership by distinguishing the governance roles of two types of state-share holders in China’s listed companies. Government agencies that act as state-share holders (“GA shareholders”) are detrimental to firm value according to both the political and managerial perspectives. Non-government agencies such as SOEs and other forms of market-o...