Corporate governance

Summary

Corporate governance are mechanisms, processes and relations by which corporations are controlled and operated ("governed"). Definitions "Corporate governance" may be defined, described or delineated in diverse ways, depending on the writer's purpose. Writers focused on a disciplinary interest or context (such as accounting, finance, law, or management) often adopt narrow definitions that appear purpose-specific. Writers concerned with regulatory policy in relation to corporate governance practices often use broader structural descriptions. A broad (meta) definition that encompasses many adopted definitions is "Corporate governance describes the processes, structures, and mechanisms that influence the control and direction of corporations." This meta definition accommodates both the narrow definitions used in specific contexts and the broader descriptions that are often presented as authoritative. The latter include: the structural definition from the Cadbury Report, which

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_governance

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (26)

Related publications

Related people (2)

Related people

Related units (2)

Related units

Related concepts (45)

Related concepts

Related courses (21)

Related courses

Related lectures (34)

Related lectures

Essays in Financial Economics

Kornelia Fabisik

This thesis consists of three parts that study separate subjects in corporate finance and corporate governance. The overarching theme is ownership by CEOs and other insiders. In the first part, which is co-authored work with Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, René M. Stulz, and Jerôme Taillard, we build the largest database of managerial ownership information ever used in the literature. We show that the empirical relation between a firm's Tobin's q and managerial ownership is systematically negative. When we restrict our sample to larger firms as in the prior literature, we confirm earlier findings of an increasing and concave relation between Tobin's q and managerial ownership. We show that cumulative past performance and liquidity can explain these seemingly contradictory results. Better performing firms have more liquid equity, which enables firms and insiders to more easily sell shares after the IPO, and they also have a higher Tobin's q. In the second part, I conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of the pledging phenomenon among U.S. CEOs. Pledging allows the owner of shares to put them up as collateral to a third party in exchange for cash. I show that between 2007 and 2016, 7.6% of publicly listed U.S. firms disclosed that their CEOs had pledged company stock as collateral for a loan. On average, CEOs pledge 38% of their shares. The mean loan value is an economically sizeable $65 million. CEOs use the funds to either double down (6.0%), hedge their ownership (3.5%), or to obtain liquidity while maintaining ownership (90.5%). My event study results reveal that stock market participants view pledging as value-enhancing. Similarly, I find no evidence of its negative shareholder value consequences, except for CEOs who engage in significant pledging. In the third part, I provide the first in-depth analysis of U.S. pledging CEOs who faced margin calls. A margin call occurs whenever the value of collateral backing a loan falls below a certain pre-specified amount. I find that 15% of CEOs with margin loans have at some point faced margin-call-induced selling. The mean (median) drop in CEO ownership following margin-call-induced sales is 31.2% (22.0%). More than 87% of firms do not introduce any type of an anti-pledging policy post margin-call sales by their CEOs which could explain the absence of any major changes in CEO compensation contracts. Corporate policies in firms with CEOs who lost a sizeable ownership stake are not indicative of weakened incentives.

EPFL2020

Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Shareholder Democracy

Maxime Thibault B Couvert

This thesis is composed of two essays that study the effectiveness of shareholder democracy. In the first essay, I analyze the firm value implications of shareholder-initiated proposals. I show that managerial resistance precludes half of shareholder-initiated proposals from reaching the ballot stage. I construct a novel dataset of excluded and withdrawn proposals from the Securities and Exchange Commission's responses to managers' exclusion requests. An examination of announcement returns to the exclusion and withdrawal decisions reveals that non-voted proposals have a value-destroying nature. Special interest investors pursuing self-serving agendas and retail investors advocating for one-size-fits-all reforms explain the harmful character of non-voted proposals. I correct for the selection bias induced by managerial resistance and show that focusing only on voted proposals overstates the shareholder proposals-driven value creation. In the second essay, I study the impact of mutuals funds' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) preferences on portfolio firms. I construct measures of mutual funds' ESG preferences from their proxy voting guidelines in which mutual funds announce how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these voting policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting policies are a major predictor of funds' voting behavior. Exploiting staggered changes in funds' voting policies as an instrument, I show that investee companies adopt their mutual fund shareholders' preferred governance provisions. This adoption is the result of mutual fund shareholders' active voting. Announced voting policies also stimulate strategic proposal submissions by non-mutual fund shareholders.

EPFL2021

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter examines whether the availability of credit default swaps (CDS) has consequences for creditor governance. CDSs offer creditors the opportunity to hedge credit risk and may impact their willingness to renegotiate debt agreements after covenant violations and to monitor firms. I show that firms implement more conservative investment and financing policies after covenant violations if CDSs are traded on their debt, consistent with heightened renegotiation frictions. Moreover, firms with traded CDS contracts exhibit significantly worse operating and stock performance after covenant violations. Overall, these findings point to an exacerbation of debt-equity conflicts due to the availability of CDSs. Finally, I analyze the interaction of creditor governance and internal governance, and provide evidence suggesting that the possibility to hedge risk through CDSs also reduces creditors' incentives to monitor firms. The second chapter models the joint effects of debt, macroeconomic conditions, and cash flow cyclicality on risk-shifting behavior and managerial pay-for-performance sensitivity. I show that risk-shifting incentives rise during recessions and that the shareholders can eliminate such adverse incentives by reducing the equity-based compensation in managerial contracts. I also show that this reduction should be larger in highly procyclical firms. Using a sample of U.S. public firms, I provide evidence supportive of the model's prediction. First, I find that equity-based incentives are reduced during recessions. Second, I show that the magnitude of this effect is increasing in a firm's cash flow cyclicality. The third chapter analyzes the impact of the formation of universal banks on corporate investment by looking at the gradual dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act's separation between commercial and investment banking. Using a matched sample of U.S. firms and their relationship banks, I show that firms curtail investment after positive shocks to the underwriting capacity of their main bank. This result is driven by unrated firms and is strongest in the first two years after a shock. Moreover, I obtain similar results for borrowing firms' net debt issuance activity. As an exogenous shock to the formation of universal banks in the U.S., I also use the 1997 loosening of restrictions on commercial banks' securities activities. My findings suggest that universal banks may pay more attention to large and transparent firms that provide more underwriting opportunities while exacerbating financial constraints of opaque firms.

EPFL2015

Essays in Financial Economics

Kornelia Fabisik

EPFL2020

EPFL2015