PROF. MARC GOERGEN ON CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

I haven't posted any of these corporate governance case studies for a while. As the updated version of my corporate governance textbook is about to be published on 11 March 2018, I thought it was a good time to investigate the corporate governance of another interesting company. The company I have chosen is the Daily Mail and General Trust Plc ( DMGT Plc ), a UK company. This is a media company which owns a.o. the tabloid The Daily Mail  and the free newspaper Metro . It also has a holding in Euromoney Institutional Plc and Zoopla . An example of a Daily Mail  front page An example of a Metro  front page I chose DMGT Plc as it is  not  your run-of-the-mill UK stock-market listed Plc. The typical example of a UK exchange-listed corporation would be a Plc with dispersed ownership and weak control (see Section 3.3 of my textbook  International Corporate Governance   or its updated version  Corporate Governance. A Global Perspective )....

The Cengage edition entitled "Corporate Governance. A Global Perspective" is an improved and updated version of "International Corporate Governance" published by Pearson Prentice Hall in 2012. The table of contents of the Cengage edition can be found here . The Cengage edition was published in  spring 2018 . Changes to Cengage Edition The structure of the textbook has changed to improve the flow throughout the book. Part II, which used to be entitled “International Corporate Governance”, is now called “Macro Corporate Governance”. Parts III and IV have been swapped around to improve progression through the book. Chapter 5 on “Incentivising Managers and the Disciplining of Badly Performing Managers”, which used to be in Part II, has been moved to Part III. A new chapter, Chapter 7 on “Boards of Directors”, including some of the material which used to be in old Chapter 5, has also been added to Part III. Throughout the book, many of the case studies in the textb...

The second edition of my highly acclaimed textbook " International Corporate Governance " was published by Cengage  in spring   2018. The new edition follows the style and approach of the first edition, but its title will change to "Corporate Governance. A Global Perspective". The book can be ordered from Blackwells . A new chapter on boards of directors has been added to the book. There has been extensive updating of the material throughout the book, reflecting advances in research on and practice in corporate governance (full details can be found here ). The table of contents (subject to change) of version two is as follows: Part I – Introduction to Corporate Governance Defining corporate governance and key theoretical models Corporate control across the world Control versus ownership rights Part II – Macro Corporate Governance Taxonomies of corporate governance systems Corporate governance, types of financial systems and economic growth Corporate go...

Academics have been devoting more and more attention to board gender diversity and its effects over the last two decades. However, most of that literature has a relatively narrow focus as it limits itself to studying the effects of female directors on firm performance and firm value as well as risk taking. Nevertheless, recent literature has adopted a much broader perspective by studying the impact of female directors on various aspects of corporate decision making. This literature tends to concur that female directors and managers have a significant influence on corporate decisions. For example, firms with female directors tend to focus more on corporate social responsibility (CSR) than firms with male directors only. Female directors are also less likely to downsize their workforce. They are also more likely to hire female top executives. Female directors also differ from their male colleagues in other ways: they tend to make fewer acquisitions and for those acquisitions they make t...

The highly acclaimed textbook  International Corporate Governance  has now been published in a Chinese translation by  China Machine Press  and a Greek translation by Diplographia . The Chinese version is available from  Amazon China . The Greek version includes a comprehensive 65-page introduction on the Greek corporate governance system by  Dr. Panagiotis Staikouras ,  Assistant Professor, University of Piraeus.  The original English version was published by  Pearson Education  and is available  in print  as well as via  Kindle  and  Vitalsource . Endorsements on the back cover: 'An excellent textbook which truly stands out. It is better than any book on corporate governance that I have seen',  Luc Renneboog, Tilburg University 'Marc Goergen's book on corporate governance is by far the best textbook that has been published on the topic. He has done a wonderful job of covering the topi...

Elsewhere on this blog I have already argued that improving corporate governance is not as simple as increasing the number of independent, non-executive directors on the board. In some instances, increasing board independence may cause more harm than good as some firms may require friendlier boards, with an emphasis on providing advice rather than monitoring. In a new study I have published in the Journal of Corporate Finance  (the pre-publication version can be obtained from here ) and which is co-authored with Peter Limbach and Meik Scholz from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we find that the age difference between the CEO and the chairman of the board of directors also matters. We argue that greater age dissimilarity between the CEO and the chair is likely to increase cognitive conflict between the two, which likely results in more scrutinising by the chair of the decisions proposed  by the CEO. Such cognitive conflict is likely to be greatest when the...