PROF. MARC GOERGEN ON CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

The highly acclaimed textbook  International Corporate Governance  has now been published in a Chinese translation by  China Machine Press  and a Greek translation by Diplographia . The Chinese version is available from  Amazon China . The Greek version includes a comprehensive 65-page introduction on the Greek corporate governance system by  Dr. Panagiotis Staikouras ,  Assistant Professor, University of Piraeus.  The original English version was published by  Pearson Education  and is available  in print  as well as via  Kindle  and  Vitalsource . Endorsements on the back cover: 'An excellent textbook which truly stands out. It is better than any book on corporate governance that I have seen',  Luc Renneboog, Tilburg University 'Marc Goergen's book on corporate governance is by far the best textbook that has been published on the topic. He has done a wonderful job of covering the topi...

Elsewhere on this blog I have already argued that improving corporate governance is not as simple as increasing the number of independent, non-executive directors on the board. In some instances, increasing board independence may cause more harm than good as some firms may require friendlier boards, with an emphasis on providing advice rather than monitoring. In a new study I have published in the Journal of Corporate Finance  (the pre-publication version can be obtained from here ) and which is co-authored with Peter Limbach and Meik Scholz from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we find that the age difference between the CEO and the chairman of the board of directors also matters. We argue that greater age dissimilarity between the CEO and the chair is likely to increase cognitive conflict between the two, which likely results in more scrutinising by the chair of the decisions proposed  by the CEO. Such cognitive conflict is likely to be greatest when the...

My keynote speech at the University of Sheffield UKIERI-CRAFiC Workshop on Financial Development and  Corporate Governance in Emerging Market Economies is available from here , I argue that the three pillars of UK corporate governance, i.e. boards of directors, institutional investors and the "comply or explain" approach, need to be revisited.

N.B. This textbook now exists in  a new, 2018 version  published by Cengage and with a different title ("Corporate Governance. A Global Perspective"). 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 accountability and compliance. My view is that corporate governance is much more than this.The main approach I took in my book is to study the conflicts of interests that corporations may suffer from. The book also adopts an international approach, comparing the advantages and drawbacks of...