PROF. MARC GOERGEN ON CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Voting at annual general shareholder meetings (AGMs) has been shown to be valuable. This makes perfect sense as voting gives shareholders a say on important corporate decisions, such as the composition of the board of directors and the approval of mergers and acquisitions. It also enables shareholders to express their support or dissent of the current management. Surprisingly though, voter turnout at AGMs across the world is relatively low with an average of slightly less than 60 percent of voting shares. Nevertheless, there is variation across countries with voter turnout ranging from a low of 41 percent in New Zealand to a high of 100 percent in Cyprus. In addition, the average approval rates for management-initiated proposals range between 84 percent and 100 percent, indicating that shareholders are less likely to show dissent to the firm’s management in some countries compared to others. What explains these variations across countries? ... Read more

While the list of prospective issuers with credit ratings is lengthy, literature is sparse on how ratings from multiple credit rating agencies (CRAs) affect the performance of a company’s initial public offering (IPO). Our research is motivated by the lack of such literature and by Sangiorgi and Spatt (2017), who argue that multiple ratings are socially optimal if the benefit of the additional rating outweighs the cost of information production. This argument aligns with the “shopping hypothesis” and “information production hypothesis” of Bongaerts et al. (2012). Under the former hypothesis, issuers “shop” for an additional rating in hopes of improving … Read more

The common practice of combining the roles of the CEO and chairman of the board (CEO duality) has been the topic of one of the longest debates in corporate governance. On the one side, a majority of S&P 500 firms combine the two roles. On the other side, investors and governance experts—via shareholder proposals and public campaigns—frequently pressure firms into separating the two roles, emphasizing a lack of effective managerial oversight under CEO duality. Nevertheless, most such proposals do not receive majority support, which suggests disagreement among shareholders about the value of CEO duality. Such disagreement is consistent with the inconclusive academic literature on the relation between CEO duality and firm performance (for a review, see Krause, Semadeni, and Cannella, 2014), as well as the lack of reliability of extant studies likely suffering from the non-random choice of board structures. The above discussion highlights the need for both practitioners and scholars to...