InEntrepreneurial States, an innovative examination of the comparative politics of reform in stakeholder systems, Yves Tiberghien analyzes the modern partnership between the state and global capital ...in attaining structural domestic change. The emergence of a powerful global equity market has altered incentives for the state and presented political leaders with a "golden bargain"-the infusion of abundant and cheap capital into domestic stock markets in exchange for reform of corporate governance and other regulatory changes.
Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with policy and corporate elites in Europe and East Asia, Tiberghien asks why states such as Korea and France have embraced this opportunity and engaged in far-reaching reforms to make their companies more attractive to foreign capital, whereas Japan and Germany have moved forward much more grudgingly. Interest groups and electoral institutions have their impacts, but by tracing the unfolding dynamic of reform under different constraints, Tiberghien shows that the role of political entrepreneurs is critical. Such policy elites act as mediators between global forces and national constraints. As risk takers and bargain builders, Tiberghien finds, they use corporate reform to reshape their political parties and to stake out new policy ground. The degree of political autonomy available to them and the domestic organization of bureaucratic responsibility determine their ability to succeed.
Before a nation can produce, it must achieve social peace. That social peace has been reached in different nations by differing means, some of which have then been embedded in business firms, in ...corporate ownership patterns, and in corporate governance structures. The large publicly held, diffusely owned firm dominates business in the United States despite its infirmities, namely the frequently fragile relations between stockholders and managers. But in other economically advanced nations, ownership is not diffuse but concentrated. It is concentrated in no small measure because the delicate threads that tie managers to shareholders in the public firm fray easily in common political environments, such as those in the continental European social democracies. Social democracies press managers to stabilize employment, to forego some profit-maximizing risks with the firm, and to use up capital in place rather than to downsize when markets no longer are aligned with the firm's production capabilities. Since managers must have discretion in the public firm, how they use that discretion is crucial to stockholders, and social democratic pressures induce managers to stray farther than otherwise from their shareholders' profit-maximizing goals. Moreover, the means that align managers with diffuse stockholders in the United States-incentive compensation, hostile takeovers, and strong shareholder-wealth maximization norms-are weaker and sometimes denigrated in continental social democracies. Hence, public firms there have higher managerial agency costs, and large-block shareholding has persisted as shareholders' best remaining way to control those costs. Social democracies may enhance total social welfare, but if they do, they do so with fewer public firms than less socially responsive nations. The author therefore uncovers not only a political explanation for ownership concentration in Europe, but also a crucial political prerequisite to the rise of the public firm in the United States, namely the weakness of social democratic pressures on the American business firm. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199205301/toc.html
From bank bailouts and corporate scandals to the financial panic of 2008 and its lingering effects, corporate governance in America has been wracked with crises. Amid a weakening system of checks and ...balances in which corporate executives have little incentive to protect shareholder interests, U.S. corporations are growing larger and more irresponsible at the same time. But dependence on corporate profit was crucial to the early republic's growth, success, and security: despite protests that incorporated business was an inefficient and potentially corrupting system, U.S. state governments chartered more corporations per capita than any other nation-including Britain-effectively making the United States a "corporation nation." Drawing on legal and economic history, Robert E. Wright traces the development and decline of corporate institutions in America, connecting today's financial failures to deteriorating corporate law.In the nineteenth century, checks and balances kept managerial interests aligned with those of stockholders, and public opinion grew supportive as corporations raised billions of dollars to finance infrastructure such as transportation networks, financial systems, and manufacturing operations. But many of these checks and balances were dismantled after the Civil War, allowing leeway for the managerial malfeasance that spiraled into economic crisis in the twenty-first century. Bolstered with archival and original data, including the first complete count of American business corporations before the Civil War,Corporation Nationmakes a compelling argument for improved internal governance and more effective external government regulation.
Corporate governance disclosures form a key part of a company’s non-financial reporting. Several studies consider the determinants of corporate governance reporting, including external factors such ...as country-specific legislation and scandals, and internal factors such as financial performance, size and culture. Others consider the consequences of corporate governance reporting, using simple proxies for corporate governance mechanisms such as board composition characteristics to analyse the impact on financial reporting quality and company valuation. Yet the determinants and consequences of corporate governance reporting may be interlinked, and many quantitative studies fail to consider these links and their multiple effects adequately. Poor financial performance, for example, can be both a determinant and a consequence of the underlying governance mechanisms that corporate governance reporting aims to capture. The framework provided in this paper considers both the determinants and consequences of corporate governance and likely links between them, and also considers internal corporate governance mechanisms and the measures that are used as their proxies. In combining these three aspects of corporate governance and showing potential links, the framework offers insights into future research opportunities. The framework can be adapted to any country or organisational setting and also offers the opportunity to consider theories other than agency theory when studying corporate governance disclosures.
This study examines how corporate governance and ownership structure relate to the financial performance of firms. We estimated this relationship using fsQCA. We enhanced our analysis using ...complementary linear and non-linear multiple regression analysis. The panel data used in this study covered 1207 companies from 59 countries across 19 sectors for the period 2013 to 2015. The study makes two main contributions. First, the multiple empirical techniques employed in this study offer a broader approach to the empirical analysis of financial performance. Second, the study aids our understanding of the role of corporate governance and ownership in the financial performance of firms.
InPublic Law and Private Power, John W. Cioffi argues that the highly politicized reform of corporate governance law has reshaped power relations within the public corporation in favor of financial ...interests, contributed to the profound crises of contemporary capitalism, and eroded its political foundations. Analyzing the origins of pro-shareholder and pro-financial market reforms in the United States and Germany during the past two decades, Cioffi unravels a double paradox: the expansion of law and the regulatory state at the core of the financially driven neoliberal economic model and the surprising role of center-left parties in championing the interests of shareholders and the financial sector.
Since the early 1990s, changes in law to alter the structure of the corporation and financial markets-two institutional pillars of modern capitalism-highlight the contentious regulatory politics that reshaped the legal architecture of national corporate governance regimes and thus the distribution of power and wealth among managers, investors, and labor. Center-left parties embraced reforms that strengthened shareholder rights as part of a strategy to cultivate the support of the financial sector, promote market-driven firm-level economic adjustment, and appeal to popular outrage over recurrent corporate financial scandals. The reforms played a role in fostering an increasingly unstable financially driven economic order; their implication in the global financial crisis in turn poses a threat to center-left parties and the legitimacy of contemporary finance capitalism.
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