Cross‐Border Auction Cycle Effects of Sovereign Bond Issuance in the Euro Area

We provide evidence for the euro area of spillovers from foreign public debt auctions into domestic secondary‐market auction cycles. We also confirm existing evidence of such spillovers from domestic issues into the domestic secondary market. Consistent with a theory of primary dealers’ limited risk‐bearing capacity, we find that auction cycles from domestic issues are stronger during the recent crisis period, whereas cross‐border effects are stronger in the precrisis period, but this evidence is not strong. This finding likely reflects the opposing effects of reduced sovereign bond market integration during the crisis and higher yield covariances caused by more market volatility.     

Zombie Board: Board Tenure and Firm Performance

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that directors’ on‐the‐job learning improves firm value up to a threshold, at which point entrenchment dominates and firm performance suffers. To address endogeneity concerns, we use a sample of firms in which an outside director suffered a sudden death, and find that sudden deaths that move board tenure away from (toward) the empirically observed optimum level in the cross‐section are associated with negative (positive) announcement returns. The quality of corporate decisions also follows an inverted U‐shaped pattern in a sample of firms affected by the death of a director.     

An international study of internal audit function quality

We investigate organisational and environmental factors that influence firms’ incentives to develop high-quality internal audit functions (IAFs) by using a unique international sample formed by matching proprietary data from a global internal auditor survey with public data obtained from Worldscope. Concerning organisational factors, we find that a positive relationship exists between IAF quality and firm complexity and confirm that complex firms have a higher demand for monitoring and advising and, therefore, a greater need for formal controls. In addition, IAF quality is positively related to board monitoring and audit committee diligence but negatively associated with CEO power, which suggests that IAF quality is influenced by other key players in corporate governance. Regarding environmental factors, we document that IAF quality is positively associated with industry competition, which implies that a firm’s incentive for a high-quality IAF is enhanced when confronted with greater environmental uncertainty. Furthermore, IAF quality has a significantly positive relationship with our self-constructed index of IAF requirements included in national corporate governance codes, which indicates that strong home-country corporate governance codes play a role in fostering IAF development.     

Corporate Governance,Social Responsibility,and Data Breaches

We study whether corporate governance and social responsibility are related to data breaches. We find that socially responsible companies with smaller boards and greater financial expertise are less likely to be breached. The financial impact of a breach is visible in the long term. Specifically, data‐breach firms have –3.5% one‐year buy‐and‐hold abnormal returns. Additionally, banks with breaches have significant declines in deposits and nonbanks have significant declines in sales in the long run. Finally, we find that following a data breach, companies are more likely to replace their chief executive officer and chief technology officer as well as improve their governance and social responsibility.     

Board governance and corporate performance

We examine the link between the monitoring capacity of the board and corporate performance of UK listed firms. We also investigate how firms use the flexibility offered by the voluntary governance regime to make governance choices. We find a strong positive association between the board governance index we construct and firm operating performance. Our results imply that adherence to the board‐related recommendations of the UK Corporate Governance Code strengthens the board's monitoring capacity, potentially helping mitigate agency problems, but that investors do not value it correspondingly. Moreover, in contrast to prior UK findings suggesting efficient adoption of Code recommendations, we find that firms at times use the Code flexibility opportunistically, aiming to decrease the monitoring capacity of the board, which is followed by subsequent underperformance. This finding questions the effectiveness of the voluntary approach to governance regulation followed in the UK and in many countries around the world.     

股权制衡、非国有股东委派董事与公司绩效

从公司治理层面完善国有控股企业的股权制衡是国企混合所有制改革的重点和难点,以往学者仅仅研究了股权制衡与公司绩效之间的关系,很少研究两者关系的作用路径和影响机理.因此,引入非国有股东委派董事这一概念,研究非国有股东委派董事在股权制衡与公司绩效之间发挥的中介效应.结果表明:股权制衡有利于公司绩效的提升,非国有股东委派董事在股权制衡与公司绩效两者之间发挥了中介效应.     

Investments,Credit, and Corporate Financial Distress: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

Although they are instrumental for economic development, productivity-enhancing corporate investments may increase the financial vulnerability of companies, especially in an economic and financial crisis. We employ an instrumental probit model with the aim of finding evidence for the investment and credit patterns that led companies into financial distress during the global financial crisis 2009–2010. The company-level micro-data for our study on three Central and East European countries—Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and two Baltic countries, Latvia and Lithuania—originates from two independent surveys, the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey conducted in 2008 and the Financial Crisis Survey conducted in 2009/2010. Both were carried out jointly by the EBRD and the World Bank. Our results emphasize a substantial adverse impact from investment intensity and debt financing on company financial soundness during a crisis. On top of that, we discover a strong non-linear pattern in the sensitivity of company distress to its investment-financing nexus.     

The Relevance of Western Corporate Governance in Mitigating Management Misconduct in Thailand

This article provides empirical evidence on the relevance of structures central to Western models of corporate governance in mitigating management misconduct in Thailand. We find no evidence supporting the effectiveness of Western-based corporate governance structures such as board independence, audit committee effectiveness, and separating the roles of CEO and Board Chair in limiting management misconduct. However, we do find evidence supportive of independent directors with more experience and longer tenure, the presence of institutional ownership, and concentrated controlling ownership in limiting management misconduct. This provides some support for the validity of resource dependency theory in an emerging economy setting.