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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate governance and firm performance by conducting a meta-analysis of 25 previous studies. The analysis has three specific concerns, i.e. the moderating effects of legal systems (common law or civil law), governance mechanisms (external or both external and internal governance together) and performance measures (accounting or market value).

The methodology used is the meta-analysis technique developed by Hunter et al. (1982).

The findings show that the external governance mechanisms measured by anti-takeover provisions and market value of firm performance measured by Tobin’s Q and market to book value are the key moderators of this relationship.

This paper has important implications for regulators and directors by proposing external governance to be an influential factor of firm performance. This paper is also of interest to the investors and companies by highlighting the significant relationship between corporate governance and market value of the firm.

As the author finds that the external governance mechanism (anti-takeover provisions) exerts more influential effect on firm performance than both external and internal governance together, this research confirms the imperative for external governance to increase the firm value.

This paper aims to examine whether the corporate governance rankings published by a market information intermediary are reflected in the values that investors accord to firms.

Panel data from 289 Canadian firms in the four‐year period 2002‐2005 were analyzed using a price model.

The results suggest that the corporate governance rankings published by the market information intermediary are related to not only firm market value, but also to accounting results.

This study provides empirical observations that would be useful for various organizations involved in the regulation of corporate governance practices and the standardization of relevant data elements.

This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that information published by an information intermediary is reflected in firm market values. Moreover, this information appears to be related to the accounting results. Thus, good governance rankings are reflected in the accounting results.

Prior research suggests that hospitality firms behave differently than other firms in terms of financing and investment issues. Such behavior may be attributable in part to agency problems and corporate governance structures in hospitality firms. This paper contains a report of an investigation into whether corporate governance mechanisms differ in hospitality firms relative to other industries. Our findings suggest that hospitality firms are more likely to experience agency problems than are nonhospitality firms. Hospitality firms have lower governance control mechanisms, better financial performance and higher-quality earnings than nonhospitality firms. An understanding of corporate governance control mechanisms helps to reduce agency problems and improves the hospitality firm's performance in the hospitality corporation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of corporate governance strength as measured by the Gompers governance index (gindex) and other related factors on corporate risk as measured by implied volatility of returns.

The research incorporates implied volatility as the measure of risk, as compared to earlier studies that have used historic volatility measures. Governance variables include the Gompers Index, as well as other measures to control for firm size, ownership and leverage.

The findings indicate that corporate risk is significantly inversely‐related with the gindex, which essentially gauges how extensively antitakeover provisions are adopted by a firm. Firm size is the other variable significant in both univariate and multivariate models. Financial leverage and the percentage of outsiders on the board are significantly related to firm risk when not controlling for other factors. Board percentage of voting power does not appear to affect firm riskiness statistically.

Future research needs to examine specifically why higher takeover defenses lead to lower implied volatility. This includes exploring whether the lower level of expected volatility is due to lower levels of takeover activity or whether firms with poor governance assume a suboptimal amount of risk.

The paper contributes to the literature by the use of implied volatility as the measure of risk. The results are robust and provide further support for the relationship between corporate governance and risk. While counter to initial expectations, these results suggest, at the very least, a firm with good governance may not necessarily have low implied volatility in its stock price.

As corporations continue to face substantial information asymmetries between managers and shareholders, they must decide how to mitigate this agency problem using various mechanisms of corporate governance. Two of these mechanisms include the board of directors and takeover defenses. The purpose of this paper is to show that rather than having an additive effect, the marginal benefit of using one of these mechanisms declines as the use of the other increases.

Using a governance index that measures the firm's takeover defenses and a unique board of directors index, the study employs both univariate analyses and multivariate simultaneous equation modeling in order to test the hypotheses.

The results of these tests show that these two measures of corporate governance should be viewed as a set rather than as individual components. In other words, a strong board is inversely related to strong shareholder protection in the form of takeover defenses. The study further analyzes the extent to which growth opportunities influence this relationship using a logistic regression approach. It appears that a firm's opportunity for growth is related to the strength of its board of directors, yet not to its governance provisions.

By analyzing a specific combination of current corporate governance practices, these results can assist firms at a practical level by providing information on optimal solutions to the agency problem.

This paper aims to examine whether agency costs predict disciplinary takeover likelihood for the UK listed companies between 1986 and 2015.

Using survival analysis, the approach is to identify candidates for disciplinary takeover on the basis of Tobin’s Q (TQ), which is consistent with the approach advocated by Manne (1965). This study then examines how indicators of agency costs affect takeover likelihood within the set of disciplinary candidates.

This paper provides evidence of the effectiveness of TQ, rather than excess return, in identifying disciplinary takeover candidates. Takeover hazard for disciplinary candidates is higher for companies with higher levels of asset utilization and sales growth in particular. Companies with stronger agency problems are relatively less susceptible to disciplinary takeover.

Given the UK context of the study, where anti-takeover provisions are disallowed and when compared to findings of US studies, the results imply some support for the effectiveness of an open merger policy.

While the connection between takeover likelihood and the market for corporate control has been made in previous studies, the study adopts a more explicit agency theory framework than previous studies of takeover likelihood. A key component of the contribution follows from differentiating candidates for disciplinary takeovers from other forms of mergers and acquisitions.

Based on the textual-analyzed data covering 2148 IPO firms in China’s stock market during the 2007–2018 period, the authors’ purpose is to examine the influence of anti-takeover provision (ATP) adoption on initial public offerings (IPO) underpricing and identify the reducing effect of the former.

The authors examine the sample consisting of Chinese A-share listed IPO firms between 2007 and 2018 from China Stock Market Accounting Research and Chinese Research Data Services, with ATP data collected from the IPO firm chapters. Specifically, the authors use text analysis to identify whether there are ATPs in the IPO firm chapters, as well as the number of ATPs. H1: IPO underpricing is less severe for firms adopting ATPs. H2: The effect of ATP adoption on IPO underpricing is more salient for firms in worse information environments.

The authors examine the influence of ATP adoption on IPO underpricing and identify the reducing effect of the former. This effect can be explained by the fact that adopting ATPs in IPO firm chapters can reduce information asymmetry to a large extent by helping external investors obtain more private information, which alleviates IPO underpricing. The authors also find that the reducing effect is more significant in the worsened information environment. Furthermore, the authors explore the influence of adopting ATPs on other IPO characteristics and find positive effects on IPO over-subscription, funds raised and trading activity and negative effects on listing fees.

This study mainly contributes to the literature from the following two aspects. First, the study enriches the literature about the influencing factors of IPO underpricing. Second, the study also enriches the literature about the economic consequences of ATP adoption. This study also has important policy implications. With the coming of the era of decentralized ownership in China’s capital market, ATP adoption has become more important and attracted more attention. Also, investors focus more on pricing efficiency. The findings in this paper provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between ATP adoption and IPO underpricing.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand dependency issues between the CEO and the board as well as the between the board and CEO through Emerson’s power dependency framework.

A symbolic management approach is integrated with a board-CEO power dependency model to study the dependency issues.

According to the symbolic management perspective, uncertainty increases the likelihood of symbolic actions. A high level of uncertainty in CEO dependency issues suggests a high likelihood that board power over the CEO is manifested on a symbolic level, whereas a low level of uncertainty in board dependency issues suggests otherwise for CEO power over the board. The core of board-dependency issues is information provision.

A focus on improving board control over CEO performance, compensation and strategic proposals is likely to generate symbolic actions without an effective result.

The paper advocates that an effective approach to enhance board power is through reducing board information dependency on the CEO.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between estimated default frequencies (EDFs) and a government index that proxies for takeover defense provisions for publicly‐traded financial institutions from 2002 to 2004.

Using a sample of publicly‐traded financial institutions, the effect of anti‐takeover provisions on EDFs was analyzed.

It was found that financial institutions with multiple takeover defenses tend to have lower EDFs compared with those with fewer takeover defenses. This result is robust to a variety of specifications and is supportive of the wealth distribution hypothesis. Further, it appears that the result is primarily driven by non‐depository institutions. This may imply that regulation of depository institutions mitigates takeover defense effects on managerial behavior.

This paper adds to the corporate finance literature, which reports mixed findings on the relationships between takeover defenses and firm value.

This paper aims to investigate the determinants of good governance in the US firms.

The data are taken from a sample of 624 US listed and non‐financial firms for the period of 1994‐2003. Four indices were constructed that summarize the governance quality: one indice for the board of directors, another one for the board committees, a third one for the audit committee, and a fourth representing an overall or total index. Multiple regressions analyses are used in the study to find the determinants of strong governance.

The empirical results show statistically significant and positive associations between each governance index (exception to board index) and firm size, investment opportunities, intangible assets and directors and officers ownership. Furthermore, institutional ownership and external financing needs are positively related to each governance index considered. However, growth opportunities and performance have no significant effect on governance quality.

Other corporate governance mechanisms could be considered (transparency and disclosure, anti‐takeover provisions and shareholder's rights).

This paper adds evidence to the important debate about corporate governance ratings. It gives a most comprehensive analysis to date in term of sample size and breath coverage. This paper also offers a new contribution to the debate on the determinants of good governance by isolating the effects of firm characteristics on the board of directors from the effect on compensation and nominating committees and from the effect on audit committee.