Value

Family Business Groups around the World: Costs and Benefits of Pyramids

On the Foundations of Corporate Social Responsibility

A firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice and its country's legal origin are strongly correlated. This relation is valid for various CSR ratings coming from several large datasets that comprise more than 23,000 large...

Does Corporate Governance Predict Firms' Market Values? Evidence from Korea

We report strong OLS and instrumental variable evidence that an overall corporate governance index is an important and likely causal factor in explaining the market value of Korean public companies. We construct a corporate...

Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Risk: Theory and Empirical Evidence

This paper presents an industry equilibrium model where firms have a choice to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. We model CSR as an investment to increase product differentiation that allows firms to benefit...

Should Corporations Have a Purpose?

The hot topic in corporate governance is the debate over corporate purpose and, in particular, whether corporations should shift their purpose from the pursuit of shareholder wealth to pursuing a broader conception of stakeholder or...

Complex Ownership Structures and Corporate Valuations

Corporate Governance and Acquirer Returns

How Investors Can (and Can't) Create Social Value

Most investors have a single goal: to earn the highest financial return. These socially-neutral investors maximize their risk-adjusted returns and would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced...

Corporate Governance and Regulation: Can There be too Much of a Good Thing?

We investigate how company-level corporate governance practices and country-level legal investor protection jointly affect company performance. We find that in any legal regime a few specific governance practices improve...

Changing Corporate Governance Norms: Evidence from Dual Class Shares in the U.K.

In the U.K., between 1955 and 1970, dual class shares quickly lost popularity without any regulatory intervention. The decline in the use of dual class shares was positively correlated with the relative valuations of...

Why Are Firms with More Managerial Ownership Worth Less?

Using more than 50,000 firm-years from 1988 to 2015, we show that the empirical relation between a firm’s Tobin’s q and managerial ownership is systematically negative. When we restrict our sample to larger firms as in the prior...

Growing Up Under Mao and Deng: On the Ideological Determinants of Corporate Policies

Historically, economic activities have been organized around certain ideologies. We investigate the impact of politicians’ ideology on corporate policies by exploring a unique setting of ideological change—China from Mao to...