Corporate Governance Research on New Zealand Listed Companies

Abstract

"The purpose of this article is to review and add to approximately fifty years of research on New Zealand listed companies from various disciplines. The main findings are not controversial, as corporate governance standards are high by international standards. To be sure, there has been a rolling set of corporate failures in the finance company sector since the global financial crisis--principally involving nonlisted finance companies issuing debt securities to the public--but these failures have been comprehensively addressed by recent legislative reforms. In this regard, the article will be of interest to corporate governance researchers seeking a topical review of corporate governance in a small, common law jurisdiction. A key commercial context, however, is supplied by the regional free trade agreement between New Zealand and Australia, the recent free trade agreement between Australia and the United States, and the (largely moot) free-trade agreement between New Zealand and the United States....As stated, this article comprehensively reviews and adds to extant research on corporate governance of New Zealand listed companies. It is crossdisciplinary in nature and considers legal, managerial, and accounting perspectives, as well as literature on corporate governance....We conclude that while corporate governance of listed companies was good, the same cannot be said for nonlisted issuers of debt securities. Here, poor corporate governance and supervisory failures were causal in the failure of nonlisted finance companies.