The increasing percentage of the modern capital markets owned by passive investors – index funds and ETFs – has received extensive media and academic attention. This growing ownership concentration as well as the potential power of passive...Read more
After decades of both de-prioritizing shareholders' economic interests and low corporate profitability, Japan introduced the JPX-Nikkei400 in 2014. The index highlighted the country's "best-run" companies by annually selecting the 400 most...Read more
We conduct an exploratory analysis of how researchers can address the issue of ?construct validity?, which poses a major challenge to all studies of the effect of corporate governance on firm performance. Many corporate governance studies rely on...Read more
Financial economists and commercial providers of governance services have in recent years created measures of the quality of firms' corporate governance which collapse into a single number (a governance index or rating) the multiple dimensions of...Read more
In a companion paper, we report evidence that a broad corporate governance index predicts higher share prices for Korean firms. Bernard Black, Hasung Jang and Woochan Kim, Does Corporate Governance Affect Firms' Market Values? Evidence from Korea...Read more
Passive investors, such as Vanguard or Blackrock, that track an index and have no discretion over their investments own a growing...Read more
We conduct an exploratory analysis of how researchers can address the issue of “construct validity”, which poses a major challenge to all studies of the effect of corporate governance on firm performance. Many corporate governance studies rely on aggregate governance “indices” to measure underlying, unobserved governance. But we are not confident that we know how to build these indices – often we are unsure both as to what is “good” governance, and how one can proxy for this vague concept using observable measures. These are construct validity questions.
