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The Korea-China-Japan Investment Promotion, Facilitation and Protection Agreement is the first treaty in the economic field that binds the three Northeast Asian countries together under a single legal instrument. The existence of effective dispute-settlement procedures under the treaty will contribute to the creation of a favourable investment climate in the host country. Nevertheless, there have been fears about frivolous or vexatious claims that could inhibit legitimate regulatory actions by governments. How to compose an investment chapter of the Korea-China-Japan FTA that is being negotiated is a pressing demand for all in the region. Any pertinent answers to such a quest require a thorough comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of any development of relevant rules and governance. In the end, a quest for better international investment governance in Northeast Asia in the future requires sound evaluation of lessons from the past and present.

The study, by focusing on a context dominated by firms with a concentrated ownership, in which type-II agency problems (principal-principal conflicts) may occur, aims to depict which board configurations may be effective in protecting minority shareholders by mitigating the risk of controlling shareholders' expropriation via cash holdings.

The research adopts a configurational approach and empirically conducts a fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of 268 Italian listed companies.

The analysis depicts three combinations of board configurations and ownership structures that can be considered effective, namely Active Independent Control, Female Active Control and Double Internal Control.

The study revisits the topic of the risk of expropriation via cash holdings in a type-II agency problem framework and delineates the meaning of board effectiveness in a mature context ruled by family firms, like Italy. Furthermore, by drawing on a configurational approach, it overcomes the causality relationship between each board characteristic and cash holdings policies and reasons from a “bundle” perspective.

Although tax-motivated income shifting has been widely explored, no studies have as yet analyzed the association between ownership structure and management decisions about income shifting. The ownership structure of multinational groups is characterized by different levels of minority interests, and our aim is to establish whether income shifting is explained by the aim of expropriation of minorities, as well as taxation avoidance.

We collect data on a sample of European parent companies located in five countries and their foreign subsidiaries, and run a multivariate regression based on the Huizinga and Laeven (2008) model.

Our results support the idea of minority expropriation, finding evidence of ownership-motivated income shifting. We also find that the level of minority protection affects ownership-motivated income shifting, and that, when both are present, expropriation is statistically significant.

Although the study looks at a wide range of subsidiaries, a limitation may be that it examines only firms having parent companies in five European countries. Further research would overcome this limitation and extend the literature and take into account other income-shifting contextual variables. Our results may lead regulators to pay more attention to the protection of minority interests.

This research offers insights to companies and investors, and should help them to make better-informed decisions and evaluate the best contexts for investments.

This study enriches the literature on income shifting by revealing that it can be caused by factors other than the desire to avoid taxation. It suggests that ownership structure is crucial.

This paper aims to investigate the link between agency costs mitigation via three levels of rights protection (minority rights protection, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency issues) provides the propitious climate for financing investment opportunities around the world.

We use Bartlett’s three-group method to stratify countries based on how well they protect investors as measured by the scores provided in the Doing Business dataset developed by the world bank for 189 countries. We then test a variety of independent hypotheses that the alleviation of agency costs via three levels of protection (minority investors’ rights, contract enforcement, resolving insolvency issues) is associated with better access to credit via the banking system, better valuation of listed firms via the stock market and higher investment and growth.

Our findings support Agency Theory which explains why the absence of legal protection of external investors leads to stock markets and financial institutions failing to fulfill their role of financing the economy.

The policy implication from this study indicates that countries ought to (1) develop legislation that protects investors’ rights, (2) improve the quality of their judicial system in terms of enforcing the legislation and (3) build the framework for resolving disputes during insolvency as these are important ingredients for a developed financial system.

We use the World bank dataset and a new methodology to quantify the significance of the relationship between minority rights protection, ineffective enforcement, lack of bankruptcy laws and access to firm financing via the banking sector and the stock market. It provides new evidence that the quality of the judicial system in a country matter for firms’ ability to raise financing and enhance value creation.

本文旨在探討一個假設，該假設為透過三級別權利保障（保障少數群體的權利、執行合同、解決破產問題）的代理成本緩減會為世界各地的金融性投資機會提供良好的氣侯。

我們以巴特利特（Bartlett）的三組法把國家分組，分組方法是基於該國家保障投資者的程度，而保障程度是以世界銀行為189個國家而制定的營商資料集內提供的評分來衡量的。我們把國家分組後，便就各樣的獨立假設進行測試。這些假設是：透過三級別保障（保障少數股權投資者的權利、合同的執行、解決破產問題）的代理成本緩減是連繫於透過銀行系統而產生的更佳信貸途徑，透過股市的更佳上市公司估值及更高的投資和增長。

研究結果証實了代理理論，該理論說明為何當外來投資者沒有得到法律保障時，結果會導致股票市場和金融機構不能履行其為經濟提供資金的角色。

本研究具有政策方面的意義，因研究顯示了國家應該：（1）設立保障投資者權利的法律；（2）在執行法律方面，改善其司法系統的素質；（3）建立解決破產時爭議的體系。這些是應該做的，因它們是一個已發展的金融體制的重要元素。

本文強調了一個保障投資者權利的法律環境所需的三個特定要素：對少數股權投資者權利的保障、有效的執行、有效的破產法律及透過銀行部門和股票市場而取得公司融資。這提供新的證據, 證實這三級別權利保障對公司籌集資金及提高價值創造的能力而言至為重要。

This study aims to take advantage of the unprecedented anti-corruption campaign launched in China in December 2012 and examine the effect of improved public governance on tunneling.

This study uses a sample of Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange listed companies from 2010 to 2014 and conduct regression analyses to investigate the effect of improved public governance attributed to the anti-corruption campaign on tunneling.

This study finds that the level of tunneling decreased significantly after the anti-corruption campaign, suggesting that increased public governance effectively curbs tunneling. Cross-sectional results show that this mitigating effect is more pronounced for non-SOE firms, especially non-SOE firms with political connections, firms audited by non-Big 8 auditors, firms with a large divergence between control rights and cash flow rights and firms located in areas with lower marketization.

This study highlights the importance of anti-corruption initiatives in improving public governance and in turn reducing tunneling. This study provides important implications for many other emerging economies to improve public governance.

This study contributes to the literature on the role of public governance in constraining corporate agency problems and advances the understanding of the economic consequences of China's anti-corruption campaign in the context of tunneling.

This study investigated the impact of corporate ownership structure on agency costs in the insurance industry.

The study sample included 23 insurance companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) from 2010 to 2019. Panel regression was used to account for the firm- and time-specific unobservable variables and system-GMM estimation was used to address endogeneity concerns.

The results show that managerial ownership positively (negatively) affects selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses (assets turnover), implying that unmonitored managers engage in activities that serve their own interests rather than those of shareholders. The largest shareholder's ownership has no impact on agency costs, implying that the ownership of the largest shareholder is irrelevant. However, as the wedge between the percentage of capital owned by the largest shareholders and managers increases, SG&A expenses (efficiency ratio) decrease (increases), indicating that the existence of large non-management shareholders reduces agency costs. After accounting for the endogeneity problem, the impact of ownership structure on agency costs measured by asset turnover remains robust.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to provide unique evidence and useful insights into the determinants of agency costs from a frontier market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with a focus on the insurance sector. Additionally, this study uses a new measure of separation between ownership and control by calculating the wedge between managers' and large shareholders' ownership.

This paper aims to provide empirical evidence on the extent of alteration institutional characteristics, i.e. legal origin and corruption levels, may have on the signaling effects of auditors’ reputation, underwriters’ reputation and ownership retention on initial public offering (IPO) initial returns in OECD countries.

Cross-sectional data composed of 6,182 IPOs from 30 OECD countries are used for 2003-2012. Ordinary least square with multiple linear regressions is used to test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that the legal framework and corruption level of a country alters the signaling effects of underwriters’ reputation, auditors’ reputation and ownership retention in an IPO environment. These three variables mitigate information asymmetry, signal firm value to potential investors and ultimately decrease IPO initial returns. This relationship is more significant in the civil law countries. Corruption levels negatively moderate the relationship in the common law and Scandinavian civil law countries but have no significance in the German and French civil law countries, indicating the importance of the signaling variables in these two civil law countries.

This study examines the extent of the alterations that the legal framework and the corruption levels cause to the signaling relationship between auditors’ reputation, underwriters’ reputation and ownership retention on IPO initial returns in selected OECD countries.

The stability maintenance system has played an essential role in maintaining social stability although it also has brought about social problems worthy of attention. Admittedly compensation-based stability maintenance policy can address the appeals of citizens whose rights are infringed and the dissolving effect in the provision of compensation can save the cost of stability maintenance but such stability maintenance system lacks equilibrium.

The establishment of a strict assessment system for stability maintenance performance can encourage the stability maintenance authorities to eliminate the “fuse effect” as much as possible and ensure the effective implementation of the stability maintenance system. However, the rigorous stability maintenance performance assessment also provides the possibility for profit-driven petitions.

Due to the continuous accumulation of social dissatisfaction and the lack of stability maintenance equilibrium in the implementation of the compensation-based stability maintenance policy, public governance will fall into a stability maintenance paradox of “greater instability resulting from stability maintenance”.

The provision of sufficient means for the people to protect their interest by implementing measures such as strengthening the rule of law mechanisms is the key to achieve long-term social stability.

Faced with the challenges of rural population decline, combined with the widespread expansion of homesteads in rural areas, local Chinese governments hope to strictly control and minimize rural housing land. Accurately decomposing the process of rural housing expansion and revealing its driving factors will be helpful for land-use regulation by the government.

In this study, an unusually rich dataset of rural housing registration from Pudong New Area in Shanghai is employed. The study aimed to decompose the fragmented accumulation process and its expansion determinants on rural housing assets. The dataset covers all samples of rural households and housing plots at 72 surveyed villages in six towns.

Housing offers profitable capital and earning assets to villagers at the urban fringe, so they have a powerful incentive to build and expand more. The results of this analysis showed that the expansion of rural housing is largely due to the haphazard construction of auxiliary rooms by villagers, especially on plots of arable land that are adjacent to their houses that have been stealthily converted into auxiliary rooms and sheds. Low costs and weak penalties have led to an increase in rent-seeking expansions to rural houses. Houses with the smaller initial areas, families with more laborers and household heads, and the proximity of villages to downtown with convenient living services were the main driving factors for expanding houses. A concerted effort is needed to control the disorganized and unlicensed expansion of housing. This effort should include formulating areas for free use by villagers, high taxes on overused areas, serious penalties for unlicensed housing expansion and effective land-use planning.

An understanding of the expansion status and control measures related to rural houses in Shanghai provides an important reference that can help to guide the formulation of rural housing policies, and the sustainable development of cities worldwide. Of course, this study cannot generalize about housing distribution and expansion status worldwide based on the study area in China, because China's land tenure policies are unique. But land registry data exists that makes research like this feasible. There is a need to carefully examine the detailed housing distribution in each country before it can be decided on how best to address the disorderly increase in rural housing stock, and promote the reduction of rural residential expansion.

First, the process of rural housing expansion by using an unique dataset which covers ten thousands of samples is revealed. Second, the results have policy implications for reducing the amount of idle and inefficiently rural homestead. The focus is on rural housing growth and its driving factors in Shanghai, and the villagers' motivations for housing expansion are explored.

State ownership has been common especially in industries with restricted competition. In Russia, state-controlled firms represent around 41 percent of the market value of all listed firms (Deloitte, 2015). Yet, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding the effects of various forms of government control in listed firms. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by exploring the impact of the complexity of state ownership and competition on the performance of Russian listed firms.

The sample consists of data for 72 firms (360 firm-years) in the Russian MOEX broad market index during 2011–2015. The complexity of state ownership is captured by studying forms of state control including majority/minority, direct/indirect, federal/regional, mixed structures and golden shares.

The authors find significant differences in performance relating to different forms of state ownership. State control is negatively related to firm valuation and the sales/employees ratio. Performance is weakest when state ownership takes the form minority, regional or direct ownership. State control through golden shares typically outperforms other state-controlled firms. The authors find indications of employment prioritization beyond the economical optimum. In addition, the relation between state ownership and profitability becomes positive in sectors where state firms appear to enjoy lower competition.

While the effects of state ownership have been studied on many markets, there is a lack of studies on the effects of different forms, or the complexity, of state ownership beyond direct and indirect ownership. The authors contribute to the literature on the performance effects of state ownership by studying a multitude of forms of governmental ownership as well as the role of competition in Russia. Especially the profitability of state-controlled firms is significantly affected by industry characteristics. Implications of the results are discussed both from firm and policy maker perspectives.