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This study aims to examine whether particular corporate governance mechanisms influence the performance of mergers and acquisitions.

Regression analyses investigating 1,596 recent acquisitions in the US market completed over the five-year period from 2009 to 2013 are performed.

The results show that board independency, CEO duality and level of CEO fixed compensation have an impact on the return of acquisitions. Moreover, the findings indicate that acquisitions significantly create value for bidders delivering a positive cumulative abnormal return upon announcement. Finally, also focusing on the 690 relative larger deals, there is a clear evidence of a positive influence of good corporate governance mechanisms over the quality of acquisitions completed.

To our knowledge, this is the first paper trying to identify corporate governance mechanisms related to the best acquisition decisions, by using specifically the three corporate governance variables (CEO duality, CEO fixed compensation and board independency).

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which corporate governance (CG) systems adopted by Latin American listed firms affect their cost of equity capital. Several studies on the link between the two aforementioned dimensions have been carried out, but none in the context of Latin American firms.

A CG index is created by taking into account the peculiarities of each country and the recommendations given by the corresponding CG institutes. In particular, to assess the level of CG quality, three sub-indexes have been identified: “Disclosure”, “Board of Directors” and “Shareholder Rights, Ownership and Control Structure”.

The results indicate a negative relationship between CG quality and the cost of equity. In particular, the “Disclosure” component is the one mostly affecting the cost of equity.

This study contributes to the literature by adding knowledge on the relationship between CG and cost of capital considering, for the first time, the overall Latin American market.

The paper proves that institutional investors all over the world are disposed to pay a premium to invest in firms with effective CG standards; moreover, this premium is higher in emerging countries such as those analyzed in this paper, rather than in developed countries.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper empirically investigating the relationship between CG and cost of capital in Latin America.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the existence of a relationship between socially responsible behavior of companies and price trends of their stocks.

The analysis is conducted by empirically testing data of environmental, social and governance ratings of a sample of European firms between December 2005 and December 2010. A disaggregate analysis is also performed to infer whether a specific contribution of all the different factors that make a business socially responsible can be observed in the value generation process.

The results show that the application of a sustainable approach are successful in creating value, both to the investor and the issuer companies.

Findings of this work are significant with respect to portfolio management, because they suggest, on one hand, the myopia of a short-term approach (short-termism), and on the other hand, the importance of sustainable investing.

This paper focusses on the integration that has led many international groups to explicitly include extra-financial risk factors in their decision-making processes, by applying the by the four-factor model on a brand new data set.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the implementation of a defined competitive strategy – differentiation or cost leadership – brings about different value creation levels, where “value” is defined in a twofold perspective as “shareholder value” vs “stakeholder value” and “social capital”.

A sample of 169 European companies is investigated. Simple linear regressions and t-tests for the equality of means are conducted.

While no significant differences are found in the creation of value for the shareholders, firms following differentiation strategies generate considerably higher value for all the stakeholder groups than companies pursing cost leadership strategies. Results also show that size and reputational considerations play a significant role in explaining the different stakeholder value performances.

Some data such as off-balance sheet items could have influenced the calculation of the discriminant values for strategy classification.

Although the two groups manage to achieve comparable levels of profitability, the differentiators, presumably because of their structural outward-facing orientation, seem to be better positioned to meet the challenges of the next wave of growth, which resides in the substantial interconnection between economic and societal value. Companies need a better understanding of how the stakeholder value theory and social capital can influence value creation and long-term success.

In light of the importance of competitive strategy as a value-creation tool, the paper sheds new light on the relationship between competitive strategies and value creation.

This paper aims to analyse the risk and return trade‐off in the film industry, and to explain the managerial decisions justifying significant investments in such a risky and uncertain sector.

An extensive dataset of movies released in US theatres over a period of 12 years along with descriptive statistics, frequency analysis and scatter plot methodology are used.

The findings highlight: a positive relationship, although with high levels of variance, between production budgets and revenues; and a random association between costs and rates of return.

Differently from other commodities, whose demand can be quite accurately estimated, the success of a new film production is extremely uncertain. Therefore, the reason why major film companies have been successful over the last decades, in spite of the extreme variance that is characteristic of the industry, must be found in the management decision approach that they employ to deal with this uncertainty.

The paper uses statistical evidence to draw management implications, rather than only identifying the economic and financial behaviour of the firms running the film industry, in recognising that correct management decision approaches are behind the success of such an uncertain and volatile industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of the application of green standards on the companies’ financial returns. It aims at answering the following question: does the market reward or penalize the players that carry out responsible management policies toward environment?

Using US data from 2009 to mid-2014 and employing two financial models, that is Capital Asset Pricing Model and Fama-French three-factor model, the authors first estimate the extra remuneration provided to investors. Then, the authors link this extra return to a green-based factor. The green-factor data are taken from Newsweek Green Rankings, which annually publishes an environmental ranking of the 500 biggest publicly traded companies in the USA.

The analysis demonstrates that there exists no linear relationship between the adoption of green standards and financial returns, i.e. the “green-behavior” does not affect the remuneration required by investors. These results could be justified by the fact that the implementation of environmentally friendly standards is quite a new one.

The results could be subject to major changes in next few years, due to the increasing attention over environmental issues.

The paper investigates the financial profitability and the creation of economic value of a topical managerial issue, in light of the increasing importance of social responsible behavior for the companies. To the authors knowledge, this is the first paper that examines this topic.