Complex Ownership Structures and Corporate Valuations


Book Description

The bulk of corporate governance theory examines the agency problems that arise from two extreme ownership structures: 100 percent small shareholders or one large, controlling owner combined with small shareholders. In this paper, we question the empirical validity of this dichotomy. In fact, one-third of publicly listed firms in Europe have multiple large owners, and the market value of firms with multiple blockholders differs from firms with a single large owner and from widely-held firms. Moreover, the relationship between corporate valuations and the distribution of cash-flow rights across multiple large owners is consistent with the predictions of recent theoretical models.




The Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Governance


Book Description

The Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Governance, Volume One, covers all issues important to economists. It is organized around fundamental principles, whereas multidisciplinary books on corporate governance often concentrate on specific topics. Specific topics include Relevant Theory and Methods, Organizational Economic Models as They Pertain to Governance, Managerial Career Concerns, Assessment & Monitoring, and Signal Jamming, The Institutions and Practice of Governance, The Law and Economics of Governance, Takeovers, Buyouts, and the Market for Control, Executive Compensation, Dominant Shareholders, and more. Providing excellent overviews and summaries of extant research, this book presents advanced students in graduate programs with details and perspectives that other books overlook. - Concentrates on underlying principles that change little, even as the empirical literature moves on - Helps readers see corporate governance systems as interrelated or even intertwined external (country-level) and internal (firm-level) forces - Reviews the methodological tools of the field (theory and empirical), the most relevant models, and the field's substantive findings, all of which help point the way forward




The Nordic Corporate Governance Model


Book Description

The Nordic Region is remarkable in many ways and has been the subject of increasing interest over the past years. The five countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are culturally closely aligned and combine a well-functioning business sector and high GDP with an expansive welfare state and high taxes. What has been well less known outside the Nordic Region is the shared corporate governance model used by companies and for the first time a comprehensive study is available in English to explain this model.The main part of the study is the condensed presentation of the Nordic CG model. It is based on four country reports covering the three EU Member States (DK, F, S) and one EEA Member State (N). Each country report has been drawn up by a team consisting of a legal expert and a corporate governance expert with practical experience. To ensure that the report reflects actual practices, each team was assisted by a reference group consisting of business practitioners with extensive experience from large-cap listed companies and connections to the national CG code committees. To provide an international aspect, the renowned American scholar Ronald J Gilson contributed a comment on the report's findings in a separate chapter.The key observation of the study is that the Nordic CG model allows the shareholder majority to effectively control and take long-term responsibility for the company that they own. The alleged risk of such a system - the potential that a shareholder majority misuses its power for its own benefit at the expense of minority shareholders - is effectively curbed through a well-developed system of minority protection. The result is a governance model that encourages strong shareholders to engage in the governance of the company in their own interest, while creating value for the company and all its shareholders.




The Changing Face of Corporate Ownership


Book Description

First Published in 2000. This book examines the shareholder activism of institutional investors and the effect of shareholder activism on portfolio performance. Institutional shareholder activism includes both traditional mechanisms of influence (e.g., filing shareholder proposals) and relationship investing (e.g., long-term interorganizational contacts between owners and a corporation’s top managers).




The Influence of Blockholders on Agency Costs and Firm Value


Book Description

Markus P. Urban investigates the influence of large shareholders (the so-called blockholders) on agency costs and firm value, thereby accounting for blockholder characteristics and blockholder interrelationships. The work provides a profound theoretical and empirical analysis on the nature and effect of shareholder engagement with due regard to the specifics of the German institutional environment. Its empirical results illustrate that the effect of shareholder engagement depends on the characteristics of the specific blockholder as well as on interrelationships with additional blockholders.




Corporate Governance


Book Description

Annotation This report points the way to the establishment of trust and the encouragement of enterprise. It marks an important milestone in the development of corporate governance, and I cannot commend it too highly.--Sir Adrian Cadbury, London Recently, in Russia, a large share of the profits of an oil company was siphoned off by its controlling shareholder, leaving the company in debt to its creditors, employees, and the state. In the Czech Republic, millions of small shareholders lost their right to fair capital gains as tunneling schemes by insiders stripped privatized companies of their assets. Increasingly for developing and transition economies, a healthy and competitive corporate sector is fundamental for sustained and shared growth-sustained in that it withstands economic shocks, shared in that it delivers benefits to all of society. Presently, many developing and transition economies lack the supporting institutions and human resources so critical to sound corporate governance. The challenge for them is to adapt systems of corporate governance to their own corporate structures and implementation capacities, public and private, to create a culture of enforcement and compliance. For the first time, this report incorporates a framework that encompasses the widely differing regimes--political, economic, and social-within which corporations carry on their activities around the world. It recognizes the complexity of the concept of corporate governance and therefore focuses on the principles on which it is based.




Integrating Research


Book Description

For anyone who does research, this book offers an invaluable tool for learning the techniques of researching, reviewing and analyzing research literature. Applying basic tenets of sound data gathering to a comprehensive synthesis of past research on a topic, Cooper leads the reader step-by-step through the five stage process integrating research reviewing -- from conceptualization of the research problem to the concise summary of the research review. New to the second edition is coverage of computer literature searches, the theoretical underpinnings of meta-analysis, the application of these procedures, and new material on coding sheets.




Exit, Voice, and Loyalty


Book Description

An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, “exit,” is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, “voice,” is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change “from within.” The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role. The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena. As the author states in the preface, “having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of ‘unhappy’ top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little.”




The Control of Corporate Europe


Book Description

Written by an international team of authors, this book provides the first systematic account of the control of corporate Europe based on voting block data disclosed in accordance with the European Union's Large Holdings Directive (88/627/EEC). The study provides detailed information on the voting control of companies listed on the official markets in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and, as a benchmark comparison, the United States. The authors record a high concentration of control of corporations in many European countries with single blockholders frequently controlling more than fifty per cent of corporate votes. In contrast, a majority of UK listed companies have no blockholder owning more than ten per cent of shares, and a majority of US listed companies have no blockholder with more than six per cent of shares. Those chapters devoted to individual countries illustrate how blockholders can use legal devices to leverage their voting power over their cash-flow rights, or how incumbents prevent outsiders from gaining voting control. It is shown that the cultural and linguistic diversity of Europe is (almost) matched by its variety of corporate control arrangements.