PROF. MARC GOERGEN ON CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Similar to most academics, I get lots of unsolicited emails from potential PhD students asking me whether I would be willing to supervise them. Hence, I thought I should put together the Dos and Don'ts of doing this. Dos Don'ts Email only potential supervisors in your area of research. Email everybody in the department or school. Start your email with "Dear Sir or Madam". Specify a topic that is of interest to you . Be as specific as possible. Ideally, you should attach a detailed research proposal to your email. State that you want to do a PhD in an area as large and vague as e.g. finance. Write that, since the age of 5, it has been your dream to do a PhD. (I didn't know what a PhD was at that age!) This is not a great start. The choice of the university is an important consideration. So is identifying a suitable supervisor. Do your research by consulting staff profiles. Choose a supervisor who is research act...

These case studies can be done once you have read Part I of my textbook " Corporate Governance. A Global Perspective ". I suggest you read all three chapters, with a particular focus on the third chapter. If you are a lecturer, you may use these case studies in class to help your students understand the theoretical concepts discussed in Part I of the textbook. All the following case studies illustrate how the large shareholder in listed European and US companies manages to have strong control while holding much less ownership. DGMT Plc Oohh Danone - More than just a yoghurt Google Inc. - Google has now been restructured and Larry Page and Sergey Brin's holdings are now in Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. However, the stylised facts about Google as uncovered by this case study still apply to Alphabet Inc.

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...