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The main aim of this study is to examine the effect of investment in outside governance monitoring (IOGM), through non-executive directors' remuneration (NEDR) and external audit fees (AFEE), on real earnings management (REM) in an emerging market in the Southeast Asia region, Malaysia.

The data comprises 1,056 observations from manufacturing companies listed on Bursa Malaysia for the four-year period, 2013 to 2016. The study tests IOGM individually and aggregately with REM. Feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) regression is used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that NEDR is negatively and significantly associated with REM. Likewise, AFEE is significantly associated with lower REM. Aggregate IOGM significantly mitigates REM. Additional tests conducted show consistent findings.

This evidence supports agency theory and signaling theory, that a high level of investment in governance monitoring signals a high demand for monitoring and fewer agency problems. It justifies more investment in outside scrutiny and monitoring to limit the existence of managers' opportunistic behavior in concentrated markets. This study relies on an aggregate measure of REM and focuses on manufacturing companies in Malaysia; thus, the results may not be the same using other measurements and samples.

The study, to the best of the researchers' knowledge, is the first to document evidence in an emerging market suggesting that higher NEDR and AFEE are individually and aggregately associated with lower REM. Policymakers, shareholders and researchers may consider investment in these two mechanisms as a proxy of high-quality monitoring that mitigates REM.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how cloud‐based information systems and services can support emerging and future requirements for sustainability governance of facilities.

The authors present basic elements of cloud‐based sustainability governance platforms, conduct a survey of existing industrial platforms and research works, discuss distinguishable and common characteristics of cloud computing platforms for sustainability governance, and give views on future research.

Cloud computing emerges as a potential candidate for supporting sustainability governance. However, several techniques must be provided in order to support multiple stakeholders, complex analysis and compliance processes.

The number of industrial platforms and research works in the survey is limited, as is information about industrial platforms. Furthermore, industrial platforms are continuously updated, thus some information might be outdated.

There exists no survey for understanding how cloud computing could be used for sustainability governance. The paper not only helps to understand state‐of‐the‐art in using cloud computing for sustainability governance but also discusses main components, stakeholders and requirements for cloud‐based sustainability governance platforms.

Drawing on transaction cost economics (TCE) theory and organizational information processing theory (OIPT), this study investigates how the alignments between the characteristics of service (i.e. task complexity and measurement ambiguity) and governance mechanisms (i.e. contract specificity and monitoring) can affect service performance.

The paper uses a rigorously designed survey to collect data from professionals who manage service outsourcing contracts in various industries. The respondent pool consists of randomly selected members of the Institute of Supply Management (ISM). The authors’ research question is analyzed using 261 completed and useable responses. Structural equation modeling is adopted to examine the data and test the proposed hypotheses.

The authors find that both contract specificity and monitoring have a positive impact on supplier performance. Further, for high task complexity services, contract specificity is more effective than monitoring, and for high measurement ambiguity services, the opposite is true. Moreover, the effect of contract specificity is mediated by monitoring.

Service outsourcers should use both contract specificity and monitoring in governing outsourced services and know that the former depends on the latter during execution. Facing resource constraints, they can prioritize crafting detailed contract provisions over implementing monitoring for highly complex services but consider monitoring as the primary governance tool in services whose outcomes are difficult to measure.

This study is the first to couple TCE with OPIT and consider the nature of outsourced services in the choice of governance mechanisms and empirically test the simultaneous effects of contract specificity and monitoring in the context of service outsourcing.

Responding to the call for research into the behavior of family companies to provide better understanding of corporate governance, this paper aims to examine the impact of boards’ effectiveness on the investment in monitoring costs (i.e. audit fees, internal audit function budget and executive remuneration) and how this relationship is moderated by family control.

A sample of 2,176 firm-year observations of Malaysian listed companies is used. The ordinary least square regression is used to examine the associations. Additional sensitivity tests are performed.

The study finds that there is no relationship between boards’ effectiveness and the demand for monitoring costs for the full sample. However, the findings of sub-samples (family and non-family companies) indicate that a family company with an effective board is less likely to invest more in monitoring, suggesting that the complementary association between the board’s effectiveness and investment in monitoring is a more dominant relationship than the substitution relationship in non-family companies. These findings show that the boards of directors of Malaysian family companies perform a deficient monitoring role, where the presence of family controlling shareholders in management may reduce their independence and efficiency in performing their monitoring role. The findings remain robust after performing additional sensitivity tests.

This paper contributes to the literature on corporate governance in a unique setting (family companies), where conflict of interest is created between controlling insiders and minority shareholders (Type II agency problem). It provides insight for Malaysian policymakers in assessing the issue of expropriation in family companies and enhancing the policy related to its boards.

This study aims to examine the impact of board characteristics on debt choice.

The sample comprises of unique nonfinancial firms listed in the FTSE 350 over the period 2011–2018. This study uses Tobit and OLS regressions to check the impact of board characteristics on debt choice. The results are robust to the battery of robust checks.

This study finds that board size and board independence are positively associated with public debt. However, CEO duality and board meetings frequency are inversely associated with public debt. Overall, the findings are consistent with the “financial intermediation theory” that the firms with weak governance rely on bank financing, and firms with better corporate governance go for public debt.

This study offers significant insights for investors and policymakers.

This study offers new insights regarding the role of board characteristics in firms’ debt choice by showing the significant impact of board characteristics on debt choice. The findings indicate that the board’s efficient internal monitoring may substitute external monitoring by the bank.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of monitoring local authorities on the quality of governance and public services reported by citizens in Vietnam, using the Vietnam Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) surveys.

PAPI randomly selected 200 locations in 93 districts of 30 provinces to conduct its survey in 2010, and subsequently rolled out the survey nationally in 2011 and 2012. Using 2011 and 2012 survey data, the authors compare the quality of governance and public services reported in provinces and districts that were covered in the 2011 PAPI survey with those that were not surveyed in 2010. Theories suggest that local authorities may improve their behavior if they have been surveyed and are, thus, aware that they are being monitored, leading to higher quality governance.

In this paper, the authors find that governance quality reported in later years by citizens in the surveyed provinces and districts of the 2010 PAPI survey was significantly higher than the quality reported by citizens in locations that were not surveyed in 2010. Monitoring appears to improve a wide range of governance aspects, including local participation in village decisions, transparency of local decision-making, accountability, administrative procedures and public service delivery.

The main innovation of this study is to use a randomized survey on governance as a natural experiment to measure the impact of monitoring on the quality of governance and public services, as reported by citizens.

This international empirical study analyses the relation between board transparency, CEO monitoring policy and financial performance.

The paper seeks to present a novel conceptual framework that integrates the strategic dynamics of the firm with changes in its governance systems.

The agency research agenda is extended to include other corporate governance roles, such as resource and strategy functions, alongside monitoring and control functions. Theoretical arguments are supported by empirical data related to the founder‐manager/IPO, IPO/maturity, maturity/decline and reinvention thresholds.

The paper shows that corporate governance parameters may be linked to strategic thresholds in the firm's life‐cycle. Successful transition over a threshold is accompanied by a rebalancing in the structure and roles of corporate governance compared with each previous stage in the cycle.

In the absence of longitudinal data relating to firms as they pass through all life‐cycle stages the study has been restricted to reporting illustrative data from different studies regarding each strategic threshold. Further research might usefully undertake detailed long‐term case studies using a combination of archival and interview data to trace the evolution of firms across the four thresholds.

This paper develops a novel conceptual framework that integrates the strategic dynamics of the firm with changes in its governance systems. It rejects the notion of a universal governance template and argues that corporate governance parameters may be linked to transitions from one stage to another in the firm's life‐cycle. Accordingly, it argues that changes in a firm's strategic positioning may be associated with rebalancing between the wealth‐protection and wealth‐creation functions of governance.

Contemporary supply chain relationships inherently rely on delegation of work between organizations and, thus, are subject to agency problems for which a wide range of governance mechanisms exist. This review of agency theory (AT), across four distinct fields, explains the connection between governance mechanisms and supply chain relationship types.

The study uses a systematic literature review (SLR) of articles using AT in a supply chain context from the operations and supply chain management, general management, marketing, and economics fields.

The authors categorize the governance mechanisms identified to create a typology of agency relationships in supply chains.

The developed typology provides parsimonious theory on different forms of supply chain agency relationships and takes a step towards a “supply chain-oriented agency theory” explaining and predicting relationship types and governance in supply chains. Furthermore, a future research agenda calls for more accurate measuring of agency costs, to examine residual gains alongside residual losses, to take a dual-sided perspective of agency relations and to adopt AT to examine more complex supply networks.

The review provides a menu of governance mechanisms and describes situations under which these mechanisms could be deployed to guide managers when developing their supply chain relationships.

The first review to combine and elaborate views from four major disciplines using AT as a lens to supply chain relationships. Expanding the traditional set of governance mechanisms provides academics and practitioners with a bigger “menu” of options to consider.

Institutional investors are major shareholders in publicly traded firms and play crucial roles in the financial and governance aspects of these firms. Despite their importance, little is known about their role in internal auditing. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between institutional investors’ ownership and investment in the internal audit function (IAF).

The study uses ordinary least squares regressions with two-way cluster-robust standard errors (firm and year) to estimate the relationship between institutional investors’ ownership and investment in IAF for Malaysian listed firms between 2009 and 2020.

The findings show that companies with higher levels of institutional ownership invest more in IAF, suggesting that institutional investors can effectively monitor managers due to their large holdings. Moreover, both transient and dedicated institutional investors are more likely to invest in IAF.

The results highlight the importance of institutional investors as a significant determinant of investment in IAF, which can aid regulators and managers in understanding the institutional investors’ role in governing and optimizing the efficient use of a firm’s resources. The findings also provide insight into institutional investors’ behavior regarding monitoring systems, which may inspire regulators and policymakers to consider increasing institutional investors’ participation to enhance governance structures.