Managerial agency costs of socialistic internal capital markets: Empirical evidence from China

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

The Role of Information and Financial Reporting in Corporate Governance and Debt Contracting

We review recent literature on the role of financial reporting transparency in reducing governance-related agency conflicts among managers, directors, and shareholders, as well as in reducing agency conflicts between shareholders and creditors, and offer researchers some suggested avenues for future research. Key themes include the endogenous nature of debt contracts and governance mechanisms with respect to information asymmetry between contracting parties, the heterogeneous nature of the informational demands of contracting parties, and the heterogeneous nature of the resulting governance and debt contracts. We also emphasize the role of a commitment to financial reporting transparency in facilitating informal multiperiod contracts among managers, directors, shareholders, and creditors

An analysis of majority owner-managed companies in the UK

This paper investigates the characteristics of 73 UK companies in which managers have an ownership stake of greater than 50 per cent. We find that majority owner-managed companies make less use of alternative corporate control systems and are less likely to remove their chief executive officer or other board members following poor performance. However, our sample firms actually outperform diffusely held companies of similar size in the same industry. The determinants of majority control appear more closely related to the characteristics of the controlling shareholders rather than the firm's operating environment. Changes in the ownership structure of our sample companies owe more to changes in owner-specific characteristics and security issuance than they are related to changes in the company's operating environment or company performance. We conclude that despite the obvious agency costs of managerial entrenchment for closely held companies, for the present sample at least the incentive alignment benefits of large director shareholdings are beneficial to outside shareholders. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2007 AFAANZ.

Board independence and competence

This paper analyzes board independence and competence as distinct, but inextricably linked aspects of board effectiveness. Competent directors add shareholder value because they have better information about the quality of projects. While a CEO cares about shareholder value, he also wants his board to behave loyally to him by agreeing to projects that give him private benefits. Because many aspects of the CEO-board relationship are not contractible, the paper studies a model of relational contracts, a tool that has hitherto been rarely used in work on corporate governance. The analysis reveals a tradeoff: Inefficient loyalty is endogenously easier to obtain from a less competent board. The implied conflict of interest between shareholders and the CEO is particularly pronounced in difficult times. Fortunately, the tradeoff does not arise with respect to efficient loyalty. Several empirical predictions flow from the model, some of which explain existing empirical facts while others are new