PROF. MARC GOERGEN ON CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Ed Miliband thinks that all private equity investors are bad, "stripping assets for a quick buck ... [and that] they aren't the values of British business" . So is he right or wrong? Similar to most other politicians, Ed Miliband is right and wrong. In what follows, I shall focus on the effects of private equity acquisitions on employees as there is an existing body of academic research studying that particular link. This research suggests that, on the whole, private equity acquisitions are good for employees, resulting in increases in employee numbers as well as improvements in employment practices and employee voice. However, most of this research does not distinguish between the different types of private equity investors. Nevertheless, I first want to define what I mean by private equity . Private equity involves the acquisition of a public firm or at least the facilitation of that acquisition. The firm is taken private in a so called public-to-private (PTP...

My textbook "International Corporate Governance" has been shortlisted for the Management Book of the Year 2013 award by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). The CMI received 137 entries across 5 categories. In October 2012 the CMI shortlisted 25 of the entries for the award. The winner in each of the 5 categories as well as the overall winner will be announced on 28 January 2013 at the British Library Conference Centre. I had been toying for a long time with the idea of writing a textbook on corporate governance. However, it was only when I moved to Cardiff Business School and was asked to teach an entire course on corporate governance that I seriously started thinking about this. When I was designing the course I felt uneasy about adopting one of the existing textbooks. I found these to be very limited in terms of their scope and their view of corporate governance. Not only were these textbooks Anglo-centric, but they also limited corporate governance to account...