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The purpose of this paper is to investigate what impact International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) lease accounting changes might have on corporate real estate (CRE) strategies, and what the consequences for future corporate real estate portfolio decisions might be.

A macro-analysis based on the constructive capitalization method of Imhoff et al. (1991) is used to determine the potential impact of IFRS lease accounting changes on Amsterdam Exchange Index (AEX) listed corporations. In addition, a series of interviews were held with CRE executives to discuss this impact and with CRE and IFRS experts for general insight.

The impact of IFRS lease accounting seems less severe than expected. Notwithstanding, it could form a serious bottleneck for CRE departments that do not operate on a strategic level. Therefore, IFRS lease accounting changes might act as a catalyst for the professionalization of corporate real estate management departments.

The paper provides CRE managers with a manageable insight to alter CRE decision-making processes in relation to IFRS lease accounting. The sample size was too small to make a distinction between different industries.

Past research showed that accounting is a potential variable in CRE decision-making, but did not yet clarify the possible impact of IFRS lease accounting on CRE strategies and the relating CRE operating decisions. Besides that, this paper also provides insight for options to cope with the (possibly severe) implications.

The paper examines the degree of interlocking directorships across the major Eurozone economies. It uses the major stock market indices in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium to identify the top of the corporate elite in each country. For the period of 2005–2008, it studies transnational links between European companies. The paper draws attention to a number of features of these interlocks. Firstly transnational interlocks remain relatively low but secondly they do vary considerably. An important issue here is the degree of bilateral integration which is occurring between some countries within the Eurozone, for example France and Belgium, and the degree to which other countries, most notably, Italy are increasingly disconnected, whilst the two most powerful economies, France and Germany, are very weakly connected. This variability reflects a series of structural divides between big business in the Eurozone that makes it difficult for this corporate elites to be cohesive at the European level.

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between the voting and engagement behaviour of institutional investors, i.e. institutional investor stewardship behaviour, and the enactment of stewardship by corporate boards. In doing so, this paper contributes to the evaluation of contemporary corporate governance systems and provides recommendations for the redesign of these systems.

This paper is based on a qualitative exploratory descriptive research study into assumed, prescribed and the actual behaviour of institutional investors. Their behaviour is explored through a survey and in-depth interviews with global institutional investors.

The prescription of institutional investor stewardship behaviour and the exploration of actual behaviour from an investors’ perspective led to the conclusion that assumed institutional investor stewardship exists variously as either “in form” (i.e. measured by compliance to the relevant corporate governance code) or “in substance” (i.e. the actual behaviour from the investors and investee companies’ perspective). The results suggest that that institutional investors’ actual stewardship behaviour as global investors requires a nuanced conclusion about the existence of institutional investor stewardship.

Although the number of semi-structured interviews with institutional investors was limited to just 14, these interviewees represent the majority share in terms of market capitalisation of Dutch listed companies. Additional research could clarify the perspective of other investors, such as pension funds and private investors.

The outcome of this research can serve as input for corporate governance reforms in the preambles of governance codes and the prescribed principles and best practice provisions of corporate governance and stewardship codes. This research identifies opportunities for further academic research to enrich the understanding of the role of institutional investors in enacting corporate stewardship.

This paper contributes to furthering the understanding of the mechanisms by which institutional investors, through their behaviour, contribute to enacting stewardship through their corporate boards. This is an important part of the corporate social responsibility of institutional investors. It also triggers a dialogue about the social and environmental impacts of stock listed companies.

This paper fulfils an identified need to develop knowledge about new paradigms and offers a more integrated approach to corporate governance reforms in terms of the role of institutional shareholders in the promotion of good corporate governance.

This paper replicates and extends the Bontis research on intellectual capital (IC) disclosures in Canadian companies and also elaborates on the Beaulieu et al. research on disclosures by Swedish firms.

The paper studies IC disclosures by French CAC‐40, Dutch AEX and German XETRA‐DAX publicly‐listed companies for the years 2000 and 2001. The paper also discusses country‐specific arguments in favour of and against voluntary disclosure by such companies and searches both the annual reports and financial statements for IC hits.

Applying the Gray‐scale to categorise countries, the paper finds not only that voluntary IC disclosure significantly differs between these countries, but also that this difference can be explained by country‐specific regulation and auditor conservatism.

The paper only studies Dutch, French and German IC disclosures in annual reports and financial statements. These three countries are European Union member states but “differ” significantly from one another. The differences discussed in this paper, however, are by no means exhaustive, nor do they picture the “European situation” in full.

The paper recognises that the intangible nature of IC creates tension with current country‐specific legislation and strongly calls for convergence of applicable accounting standards and practices because of the increasing importance of IC and because of the improvement of corporate governance and policy making.

The paper not only extends (or fine‐tunes) previous research, but also links with the literature that discusses the consequences of country‐specific characteristics for accounting standards and practices.

In this part of the research, we consider the costs of the turnout decision and evaluate whether the introduction of the Shareholder Rights Directive (2007/36/EC), which aimed at lowering voting costs, has had a positive impact on (small) shareholder attendance. For this, we investigate turnout rates in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. We find strong indications that the Shareholder Rights Directive indeed had a positive impact on (small) shareholder attendance in these countries. The findings of this study may encourage policy makers to further reduce the costs of (cross-border) voting. It shows that the introduction of the new Shareholder Rights Directive may contribute to (small) shareholder engagement.

The purpose of this study is to address the impact of audit quality on financial reporting quality proxied by real earnings management. To further clarify the mentioned links, this study empirically assesses the moderating effect of audit quality.

The study is based on a sample consisting of 90 non-financial companies that are listed in the Amsterdam stock exchange in AEX all share index over the 2010–2017 period. This study applies a quantitative approach and secondary data as the main source of information for analysis. This paper performs an ordinary least squares regression to examine the moderating effect of audit quality on the relationship between financial reporting quality.

Empirical findings demonstrate that corporate governance mechanism, mainly independence members, financial expert and audit committee size has a statistically significant relationship with real earnings management. However, the effect of audit committee meetings on real earnings management is not significant. There is also evidence that audit quality moderates the audit committee – real earnings management links.

This study extends the existing literature by examining the moderating effect of audit quality on the relationship between financial reporting quality proxied by real earnings management in the Dutch context.

The purpose of this research paper is to provide corporate real estate executives with a measurement tool for pinpointing and enhancing the contribution of corporate real estate to corporate strategy.

A measurement tool is designed by adopting a theoretical framework in which seven added values of real estate are aligned with nine corporate strategic driving forces. The practical applicability of this tool is validated by assessing the contribution of corporate real estate to corporate strategy at 14 Dutch‐based global corporations.

Many corporations still lack sufficient insight into the impact of corporate real estate decisions on corporate performance. Therefore, it is difficult for senior management and other stakeholders to grasp the actual contribution of corporate real estate.

Future research may be conducted to investigate the exhaustiveness of the listed real estate issues. Moreover, the linkage between the added values and the strategic driving forces could be validated further in practice.

The measurement tool supports corporate real estate executives in aligning corporate real estate with corporate strategy. Thereby it contributes to the further recognition of the importance of real estate in a corporate setting.

Prior papers on the contribution of corporate real estate to corporate strategy have primarily been focused on either pinpointing various driving forces or linking specific property decisions to corporate strategy. This paper, however, unveils the linkage between fundamental drivers of corporate real estate and corporate strategy in a comprehensive management tool for portfolio analysis and strategy formulation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the benefits, obstacles and challenges in implementing the balanced scorecard (BSC) in non‐higher education public schools, more specifically, in a Portuguese school district.

An action research approach was used to develop a BSC, help to implement changes and reflect about the outcomes.

The paper presents the BSC for the school district and discusses five benefits, two obstacles and three challenges that emerged from the study. While some findings are in line with those found in other levels of education, others seem to be context‐specific.

The results refer to a single intervention in Portugal and the methodology used precludes any generalization attempts.

The findings are particularly relevant to the Portuguese context, providing evidence that the BSC can overcome some weaknesses of schools in the area of strategic management, as identified by the literature. They also raise implications for the wider field of the BSC's use in non‐higher education public schools, suggesting reasons why things may go wrong. The results may be of value to practitioners wishing to make the implementation of the BSC more effective.

This paper contributes to the scarce body of literature on the application of the BSC to non‐profit organizations by providing an understanding of its possible benefits, obstacles and challenges in non‐higher education public schools. It shows how the BSC methodology can be adapted to fit the specific requirements of a school district. This is one of the first papers to discuss an application of the BSC to non‐higher education public schools.

This study seeks to examine the key factors that affect the timeliness of corporate internet reporting (CIR) by the Egyptian listed corporations on the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange.

The authors use firm characteristics and corporate governance variables to investigate the influence on the timeliness of CIR. They also develop a disclosure index to measure the timeliness of CIR for the listed Egyptian corporations.

The primary analysis finds a significant relationship between the timeliness of CIR and firm size, type of industry, liquidity, ownership structure, board composition and board size. The results indicate that firms typically in the service sector, that are large and have a high rate of liquidity, a high proportion of independent directors, a large number of board directors and a high free float disclose more timely information on their web sites. Furthermore, a significant association between the entire independent variables and some items of timeliness of CIR is found.

This study is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the relationship between the corporate governance and the timeliness of CIR in an emerging market.

In this chapter, we are among the first to investigate the actual course of affairs in AGMs with respect to shareholder forum rights. In the first part of the chapter, we provide descriptive statistics on the use of the right to ask questions and speak in AGMs in the Netherlands. We find that in an average meeting there are around 42 questions and remarks made by around 8 shareholders. Most of these questions and remarks seem to be relevant; with a categorization framework of 14 topics, we could already identify over 50% of these questions and remarks. However, we also find that the average number of shareholders that physically ask questions is only 8. Next, we consider the determinants of the use of these forum rights. In several panel data analyses with a Poisson distribution and a negative binomial distribution, we, inter alia, found that the ‘importance of the meeting’ generally contributes to the amount of questions and remarks and the number of shareholders that actively engage in discussions. We have also found that the number of speakers – and the number of private investors – that actively attend the AGM depends on previous attendance numbers. This may imply that there is a small base of very active (private) investors in the Netherlands. We conclude that the forum function of AGMs is definitely relevant, but given the low number of shareholders that make use of these rights, amendments may be considered.