Corporate governance

About: Corporate governance is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 118591 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2793582 citations.

Signaling Through Corporate Accountability Reporting

Abstract: We document that corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) expenditures are not a form of corporate charity nor do they improve future financial performance. Rather, firms undertake CSR expenditures in the current period when they anticipate stronger future financial performance. We show that the causality of the positive association between CSR expenditures and future firm performance differs from what is claimed in the vast majority of the literature and that corporate accountability reporting is another channel through which outsiders may infer insiders’ private information about firms’ future financial prospects.

Analysing the determinants of narrative risk information in UK FTSE 100 annual reports

Abstract: We investigate the relationship between the quantity of narrative risk information in corporate annual reports and ownership, governance, and US listing characteristics. We find that corporate risk reporting is negatively related to share ownership by long-term institutions, and thus the results of this study put forth that this important class of institutional investor has investment preferences for firms with a lower level of risk disclosure. Concerning governance, we find that different types of board director fulfil different functions, with both the number of executive and the number of independent directors positively related to the level of corporate risk reporting, but not the number of dependent non-executive directors. This supports a recent emphasis in the UK on the independent aspects of non-executive directors for good corporate governance. Separate investigation of business, financial, and internal control aspects of risk reporting that correspond to the three classes of risk-reporting guidance in the UK reveals that the pattern of risk information in the annual report may be dependent upon the form that reporting regulation takes.

Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power

Abstract: Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance. Rather than focusing on the relative power of states and nonstate actors, we focus on the sociopolitical functions and processes of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as practices of political rule. For this task, we use elements of the conception of power developed by Michel Foucault in his studies of “governmentality.” In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors but rather an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The argument is illustrated by two case studies: the international campaign to ban landmines, and international population policy. The cases show that the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power, understood as government, operates in late modern society.

Managerial compensation and firm performance : A general research framework

Abstract: A tremendous amount of research has explored the relationship between managerial pay and firm performance. We argue that this research has generally been limited because it ignores other criteria t...

Relational and Contractual Governance in Family Firms: Effects on Strategic Decision Making

Abstract: Governance of family firms differs from mainstream corporate governance in an important respect: Important owners, i.e., family members, may have multiple roles in the business. In this paper, we develop and test a model of family firm governance that incorporates both formal control and social control aspects of governance. Governance based on the formal control draws on agency theory, whereas the social control aspects draw on social theories of governance, addressing social capital embedded in relationships. Drawing on these theories, we examine the influence of different governance mechanisms on the quality of strategic decision making. The Family Business Governance Model is tested using survey data from 192 family firms in Finland. We use structural equation modeling in testing the empirical validity of the model. The empirical analysis largely supports our hypotheses on formal control and social control as well as their influences on the decision-making quality.