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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to assess the degree of disclosure about compliance with corporate governance code and the explanations provided by Italian firms and second, to analyze the relationships between this disclosure and different variables of ownership structure.

The sample was composed of 75 non-financial companies listed in Italy in 2016. Content analysis of the corporate governance statement and ordinary least squares (OLS) multiple regression models were used to test the hypotheses.

Companies tended to comply with the corporate governance code and to disclose this information, but when they decided to not comply, they did not provide adequate explanations. Findings revealed a negative relation between ownership concentration and the disclosure analyzed. Results also highlight that a more equal distribution of shares among larger shareholders is beneficial for disclosure. Moreover, the presence of a dominant financial shareholder at a high level of ownership concentration creates inefficiency of the degree of adherence to the comply-or-explain principle.

This study examines in depth the underexplored issue of “explanation” and exceeds the issue of ownership concentration, which has already been examined extensively, raising the issues of counterweight power and shareholders’ identities, which remain underexplored. In this way, results presented contribute to explaining some causes of the diverse findings that research has found about the relationship between ownership concentration and voluntary disclosure, demonstrating the importance of counterweight power and largest shareholder’s identity. Consequently, when self-regulating initiatives are designed and implemented, legislators, regulators and managers should not ignore the characteristics of the firms’ ownership structure.

The purpose of this study is to cover the ownership structure as (institutional ownership and managerial ownership) influencing the cost of equity in emerging markets.

The authors applied the regression model with the fixed-effect model in the data. Data collected from listed companies in the Iraq-Iran Stock Exchange during 2012-2017.

The authors found a significant positive associated between institutional ownership and the cost of equity in the Iranian and Iraqi contexts. The results also reveal a significant negative associated between managerial ownership with the cost of equity in the Iranian and Iraqi contexts. This means that when managerial ownership is increased, the cost of equity will be reduced. These results support the role of inside ownership to enhance fixed performance by reducing the cost of equity. So, managerial ownership can be a substitute for all shareholders. Moreover, the results indicate a similarity in the impact of the ownership structure on the cost of equity in the Iraqi and Iranian context, this means the similar elements among west Asian countries.

Financial companies such as banks and investment companies were not listed due to the difference in the nature of their work with the other sectors in the Iranian and Iraqi stock exchanges. Moreover, the authors are heavily constrained as listed companies must continue during the study period to calculate the cost of equity. Therefore, the results are difficult to generalize widely.

This international study will enable investors in, as well as local and international investors to take the appropriate investment decision-making in the capital markets in these countries (Iraq and Iran). Moreover, it contributes significantly to helping corporate governance bloggers in Iraq and Iran understand the role of the ownership structure in corporate governance.

This is the first study of the interaction between institutional ownership, managerial ownership with the cost of equity in Iraq, the study will help complete the knowledge gap with developed markets. The results are important in future research because the authors believe that it is very important for the future to look at better for percentage levels of institutional and managerial ownership in the company ownership. Although the contribution is limited, it will provide a useful guide for more papers in other west Asian countries.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between ownership structure and company performance of public companies. The central tenet of the analysis is that separation of ownership and control has an adverse effect on the value of the firm, as information asymmetry between owners and managers is exploited by management.

A cross sectional regression is conducted using data on 669 companies, which were members of the S&P 500, BUX (Hungary), WIG (Poland), SBI (Slovenia), PX (Czech) indexes in the third quarter of 2005. Owners with at least 5 percent share ownership are collected from Reuters and Business and Company Resource Center databases.

Results for CEE companies are in line with that of Earle et al. and also support Zwiebel's “space creation” concept. The negative effect of multiple shareholdings is due to collective action problems instead of alternative explanations such as manager repression. Companies in the CEE region have rather concentrated ownership, which implies that at least there is one blockholder with dominant stake allowing him to influence corporate decision making. The contribution to management control of the next largest blockholder generates tension between the two causing costs that exceed the benefits of control. Interestingly, enough in case of institutional investors as largest blockholders the formerly positive effect on performance became negative. This is in contradiction with the popular literature that emphasizes the beneficent role of institutional investors. Results for the US firms also show that dominant blockholders “create their own space” in another word when the ownership stake of the largest blockholder exceeds 10 percent the contribution of smaller owners to the monitoring and control of management is negative. This implies that even though the dominant blockholder is much smaller in size relative to the one in the CEE sample its willingness to cooperate is low. On the other hand, when the largest blockholder is not dominant the coalition of blockholders is able to create value by efficient monitoring. Institutional investor as dominant blockholder further enhances the efficiency of control, while decreases it when coalition consists solely from institutional investors.

The definition of ownership concentration outlined by Zwiebel is applied. To assess the effect of coalition of blockholders on company performance the concept determined by Earle et al. is used. Their notion is extended by differentiating between blockholder identity and the homogeneity of blockholder coalition, in order to scrutinize the consequence of shareholder activism.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate identity change in savings banks. The savings bank movement is gradually shifting from a residual culture of using the bank to promote savings, into a dominant culture closely resembling commercial banks.

Theory draws on key research in the field of organisational change and corporate identity. A qualitative methodology is used to investigate a large portion of the savings banks movement in Sweden.

The shift in culture is a result of decreasing values of original visions, a process of commercialising the savings bank idea and increasing chief executive officer (CEO) influence and professionalisation.

The results are primarily applicable for savings banks.

The paper shows the ongoing changes in the savings bank community and the effects of these changes on critical stakeholders. In particular, the important role of CEOs in non‐profit organisations is illustrated and discussed.

Few studies focus on change in culture and the consequences for stakeholder relations. There is no prior study on savings banks and organisational change.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the influence of block ownership on firm performance depends on the identity of the largest investor.

The authors analyse the data for New Zealand companies for the period from 2002 to 2007 and develop multiple regression models which test the influence of block ownership on firm performance subject to the identity of the investor. A two‐stage least square approach is employed to test the effect of possible reverse causality between block ownership and firm performance on the relationship found in multiple regression models.

The authors find that the concentrated ownership has a positive, albeit decreasing, association with firm performance. This relationship is conditioned on the identity of the largest investor. Those companies whose block investors were financial institutions performed better than their peers. The superior influence of financial investors on corporate performance did not disappear even when the endogeneity of this relationship was accounted for.

The main contribution of this paper is the finding of a differential influence of various identities of block investors on firm performance. It questions the role that some domestic block investors play in the governance of New Zealand companies and the reason why the financial system has allowed corporate entities to be the main shareholders of the majority of firms when they underperform relative to their peers.

High ownership concentration makes controlling blockholders powerful enough to use private benefits of control and able to shape the corporate governance system to favor their own interests. This paper aims to examine the effect of the nature of the ultimate firm owner on the quality of corporate governance in Brazil.

Econometric models are estimated to assess whether the nature of the ultimate controlling shareholder affects the quality of the corporate governance system. Models are estimated using panel data methodology with coefficients estimated by the generalized method of moments system estimator.

The results show that the absence of a controlling shareholder has a positive effect on corporate governance, whereas the presence of a controlling blockholder, or a shareholder agreement among a few large shareholders, has a negative effect. This adverse effect holds when the controlling blockholder is a family or another firm. The findings are in line with the expropriation effect given that weaker corporate governance system facilitates controlling shareholders’ ability to extract private benefits of control. The findings also give support to the substitution effect as powerful blockholders take on the management monitoring function by weakening the board.

Following important previous literature, the study investigates the effect of the nature of large controlling shareholders on the adoption of good corporate governance practices. The work provides additional evidence on the effect of the nature of large controlling shareholders on the quality of the corporate governance system in Brazil, taking into account the main kinds of controlling blockholders present in that market. The findings give support to both the expropriation and substitution hypotheses highlighting the presence of the principal-principal agency model in an important emerging market, Brazil.

We examine the market valuation of targets with multiple large shareholders (MLS) and single large shareholder (SLS) structures, in an international sample of M&A announcement in 19 countries outside North America. We find that the presence and power of MLS in these firms are negatively associated with abnormal returns and first-bid-to-merger-completion returns, suggesting that MLS mitigate agency problems in the target, and hence their acquisition is perceived as “a loss of good governance.” The negative association between MLS targets and returns is stronger in widely held firms suggesting that MLS indeed curb expropriation of minority shareholders. By contrast, when the second largest shareholder in the MLS structure of the target is a family, we find positive cumulative abnormal returns at the merger announcement, suggesting exacerbated agency problems in these firms that should benefit from the “acquisition of good governance.” Our evidence is robust to a battery of tests and to addressing potential endogeneity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the links between company ownership structure and financial performance in the context of the largest Central European stock market. Using the framework of agency theory, the authors address the question of the expropriation effect by dominant owners and the effect of collusion between shareholders of different types on company performance.

The authors test hypotheses on the relations between ownership concentration and the involvement of different shareholders (state, CEO, industry and financial investors) vs return on assets (ROA). The authors adopt the panel model controlling for endogeneity and sector of operation and analyze the data from the unique sample of 495 Polish non-financial firms listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in years 2005-2014 with a total of 3,203 observations.

The authors identify a negative correlation between ownership concentration by the majority shareholder and ROA, which corresponds with the expropriation rationale of blockholders. The authors also observe negative effects due to ownership concentration by the second largest shareholder, supporting the notion of collusion. The results show that ownership by industry investors is associated with a higher ROA. Ownership by the CEO, state and financial investors proves to have no statistically significant effect on performance.

The paper further develops the nature of ownership-performance relations in the specific economic context of a post-transition, emerging European stock market, weak external corporate governance mechanisms, insufficient investor protection and significant concentration of share ownership. The results add to the understanding of monitoring vs expropriation effects by large owners and the collusion between different types of shareholders.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perspectives of accounting lecturers regarding the contents of accounting textbooks. It focusses on the ideological character of introductory financial accounting (IFA) textbooks prescribed in the first year of accounting degrees in Indonesia.

The ideological analysis is informed by Thompson’s (1990) concept of ideology, which was used in a critical sense to refer to its role in serving unequal power relations. Semi-structured interviews of Indonesian accounting lecturers were utilised to collect data.

In the interviews, the lecturers revealed that the prescribed IFA textbooks focussed on prioritising shareholder interests. The mainstream view among the lecturers was that accounting textbooks realistically exhibited the natural form of accounting, whilst lecturers with an Islamic accounting and finance background notably viewed the character of IFA textbooks as serving an ideological role or permeating propaganda. The latter suggests that alternative worldviews, relevant and nuanced to the Indonesian context, are promoted in accounting education.

The findings presented in this paper should provide a basis for further research into the ideological character of accounting textbooks by analysing the internal structure of accounting textbooks and investigating the broader perspectives of other users and individuals involved in the production of accounting textbooks.

An awareness of the ideological representation of accounting textbooks can provide insights for universities, publishers and policy makers concerned with lecture structure, textbook design and regulation formulation in accounting education.

This is the first paper to empirically explore the ideological character of accounting textbooks prescribed in an Islamic developing country setting.

Social media have recently become an important strategic marketing tool to increase firm value. Based on an integrated theoretical framework, this study aims to examine the market reaction at the time of the creation of a Twitter platform for 312 firms from the Fortune 500 firms.

To test the hypotheses related to the effect of social media platforms on firm value, the event history analysis (EHA) was used, also known as event study, usually designed to examine the impact of a historical phenomenon for the US Fortune 500 firms that developed a Twitter platform.

A significant market reaction was found around the starting date of Twitter activities for the subsample of firms that are not contaminated by any other corporate announcements, but not for the overall sample. The market reaction is higher for firms with two-way interaction strategies rather than one-way messaging in both the uncontaminated subsample and the overall sample. It is higher in smaller firms, firms with losses and those with a family and/or a dominant shareholder. Further, firms in the contaminated subsample are likely to follow a two-way strategy after a positive revision of their earnings per share. We have run several robustness checks, including cross-validation on a holdout sample, and these findings remain consistent.

The integrated theoretical framework is another significant contribution. To our knowledge, this is the first study across disciplines that integrates the social exchange theory (SET), social representation theory (SRT), social network analysis (SNA), social identity theory (SIT), signaling theory (ST) and the impression management theory (IMT) into one framework that is built around information as a resource and social interaction.

The results suggest that Twitter can be used to add value if firms interact and reciprocate with the various stakeholders.

Firms using social media must interact and reciprocate with the various stakeholders.

This research is different than the published research on this topic in that it examines the impact on stock prices of the introduction of a specific social media platform, i.e. Twitter. The present results of the paper add to the prior research on database marketing and show that marketing “with” the customer is adding more value than marketing “to” the customer. The use of the net extends the scope of database marketing into a certain form of interaction marketing with “face-to-face” interaction within the relationships between the firm and its customers. Finally, the conditions under which social media platforms are used in an interactive manner are shown, and depicts that firms are more likely to use a two-way interactive strategy following a one-year period of positive momentum.