Download or read book Essays in Corporate Governance and Environmental Risks written by Kaveh Moradi Dezfouli and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of two essays focusing on long-term perspective in management. The first essay (chapter 2) studies how family firms' valuations are affected by the presence of free cash flow and anti-takeover provisions. Both free cash flow and anti-takeover provisions are believed to increase the severity of agency conflicts. However, we found that in family firms, the existence of free cash flow and anti-takeover provisions are not perceived as damaging. Our findings indicate that higher levels of free cash flow and higher levels of anti-takeover provisions in family firms are associated with higher valuations as measured by the firms' Tobin's Q. Moreover, we find that an increase in strength of anti-takeover provisions or level of free cash flow in family firms positively affects family firms' valuation. The second essay (chapter 3) uses a unique data set of natural disasters that occurred around the world during the period 1970 to 2015 and study their impact on the price and price volatility of globally traded agricultural commodities. Our results show that natural disasters affect most of the commodities examined in this study by causing an increase in their price volatility whereas prices are only marginally affected. In addition to this, we find that the total damage caused by a natural disaster affects the magnitude of price and price volatility changes of a given commodity. Finally, natural disasters affecting countries with a higher share of the global production of a commodity have a more significant impact on the price and price volatility of that commodity.

Download or read book Essays on Sustainability and Management written by Runa Sarkar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive overview of sustainability and management in India and through its insightful essays highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of sustainability as a concept. It also demonstrates the debates surrounding the concept of sustainability and its ramifications for ground-level practice in managing organisations and for public policy. The contributions from sustainability enthusiasts, practitioners from disparate fields and academics working at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, have been divided into five themes: (1) sustainability as a normative concept; (2) sustainability concept at the global level, (3) sustainability practices in Indian organisations and consumer behaviour; (4) sustainability, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility and (5) sustainability: a critique of organisational practice and government regulation. The themes reflect both new and continuing issues confronting management in the country today. Examples and in-depth studies make it relevant to the grounded reality in India. The expertise and experience of the contributors ensure that readers are left with a grasp of our current understanding of how sustainability is related to society and business, the direction this understanding will take in the future.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Legal Environment Corporate Policy and Governance written by James Malm and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on the legal environment, corporate policy and corporate governance. The dissertation research seeks to contribute to a new understanding of the relationship between the legal environment, corporate behavior and corporate governance. In the first essay, we use a unique hand-collected dataset on corporate subsidiaries and lawsuits to examine the relationship between litigation risk and subsidiary usage by large U.S. corporations. We find that firms, in general, tend to have a large number of subsidiaries when exposed to high litigation risk. Dividing the sample into financially distressed and financially healthy sub-samples, we find that financially distressed firms tend to have a large number of subsidiaries when exposed to high litigation risk, while this tendency is less pronounced in financially healthy firms. High severity litigation risk matters more than low severity litigation risk. The results are consistent with the prediction of theoretical models. Taken together, they bring to light an efficient link between litigation risk and subsidiary usage. The second essay empirically examines the relationship between litigation risk and key financial and investment policy choices. We use a unique hand-collected database on corporate lawsuits as a proxy to measure litigation risk. The key financial and investment policies we investigate include: the levels of financial leverage, cash holdings, and capital expenditures. After controlling for other determinants of corporate financial and investment policies, we find a negative relationship between litigation risk and financial leverage. We also find a positive relationship between the level of cash holdings and securities and intellectual property litigation. In addition, we document a negative relationship between the level of cash holdings and high severity litigation risk in general, and government contracts, corporate governance, and employment and labor litigation, in particular. Furthermore, we find a positive relationship between litigation risk and the level of capital expenditures. Partitioning the sample into unified and parent-subsidiary firms, we find that relative to high litigation risk firms with a unified corporate structure, high litigation risk firms with parent-subsidiary structures have significantly higher levels of financial leverage and cash holdings, and lower level of capital expenditures. Thus, corporate organizational form appears to be a clear substitute for financial policy in responding to litigation risk. Taken together, these results highlight a link between litigation risk and corporate financial and investment policy choices. In Essay three, we examine the effects of board structure on corporate litigation. Using a unique hand-collected dataset on corporate lawsuits and the 2002 NYSE/NASDAQ exchange listing requirements on board independence as an exogenous shock, with the difference-in-difference methodology, we empirically examine how an increase in the percentage of independent directors on boards affects a wide variety of corporate litigation. We find that an exogenous increase in the percentage of independent directors on a board is associated with a significant decrease in corporate litigation. In addition, the results are stronger in industries where the exposure to the various types of corporate litigation is greater. These findings provide evidence of the effective monitoring role of independent directors.

Download or read book Essays on Corporate Risk Governance written by Mr. Gaizka Ormazabal Sanchez and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation comprises three papers on the governance of corporate risk: 1. The first paper investigates the role of organizational structures aimed at monitoring corporate risk. Proponents of risk-related governance structures, such as risk committees or Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) programs, assert that risk monitoring adds value by ensuring that corporate risks are managed. An alternative view is that such governance structures are nothing more than window-dressing created in response to regulatory or public pressure. Consistent with the former view, I find that, in the period between 2000 and 2006, firms with more observable risk oversight structures exhibit lower equity and credit risk than firms with fewer or no observable risk oversight structures. I also provide evidence that firms with more observable risk oversight structures experienced higher returns during the worst days of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and were less susceptible to market fluctuations than firms with fewer or no observable risk oversight structures. Finally, I find that firms without observable risk oversight structures experienced higher abnormal returns to recent legislative events relating to risk management than firms with observable risk oversight structures. 2. The most common empirical measure of managerial risk-taking incentives is equity portfolio vega (Vega), which is measured as the dollar change in a manager's equity portfolio for a 0.01 change in the standard deviation of stock returns. However, Vega exhibits at least three undesirable features. First, Vega is expressed as a dollar change. This implicitly assumes that managers with identical Vega have the same incentives regardless of differences in their total equity and other wealth. Second, the small change in the standard deviation of returns used to calculate Vega (i.e., 0.01) yields a very local approximation of managerial risk-taking incentives. If an executive's expected payoff is highly nonlinear over the range of potential stock price and volatility outcomes, a local measure of incentives is unlikely to provide a valid assessment of managerial incentives. Third, Vega is measured as the partial derivative of the manager's equity portfolio with respect to return volatility. This computation does not consider that this partial derivative also varies with changes in stock price. The second paper develops and tests a new measure of managerial risk-taking equity incentives that adjusts for differences in managerial wealth, considers more global changes in price and volatility, and explicitly considers the impact of stock price and volatility changes. We find that our new measure exhibits higher explanatory power and is more robust to model specification than Vegafor explaining a wide range of measures of risk-taking behavior. 3. The third paper examines the relation between shareholder monitoring and managerial risk-taking incentives. We develop a stylized model to show that shareholder monitoring mitigates the effect of contractual risk-taking incentives on the manager's actions. Consistent with the model, we find empirically that the positive association between the CEO's contractual risk-taking incentives and risk-taking behavior decreases with the level of shareholder monitoring. Furthermore, consistent with the board anticipating and optimally responding to shareholder monitoring, boards of firms exposed to more intense monitoring design compensation contracts that provide higher incentives to take risks. Overall, our results suggest that, when evaluating risk-taking incentives provided by a compensation contract, it is important to account for the firm's monitoring environment.

Download or read book Adapting and Mitigating Environmental Social and Governance Risk in Business written by Ziolo, Magdalena and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) risk considers the nonfinancial risks that could arise in a business, such as sustainability, brand reputation, legal aspects, ethics, and more. As businesses all have their own risk profiles, there is a need for risk management and mitigation that is unique for each company. Because of this variability, the study on ESG risk factors and motives of incorporating the ESG perspective into business models are crucial yet challenging. Therefore, it is important to understand how companies are adapting and mitigating ESG risk in diverse types of businesses. Adapting and Mitigating Environmental, Social, and Governance Risk in Business examines processes in enterprises that can increase the sustainability of business models and their coherence with the assumptions of the concept of sustainable development and ESG risk. Furthermore, the book explores how enterprises operating in different sectors are adapting their business models towards sustainability in order to create sustainable value. This book is a valuable tool for managers, executives, entrepreneurs, practitioners, academicians, researchers, and graduate students in finance, business, and management.

Download or read book Corporate Governance and Sustainability written by Suzanne Benn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, as corporations and governments have increasingly been confronted with managing the expectations of a society newly alerted to the social and environmental risks of economic development, recognition is dawning that achieving a sustainable world is dependent upon the democratic management and equitable distribution of these risks for now, and for the future. This book, the first to explore the themes of corporate governance and sustainability, argues that a better system of governance on a number of levels holds the key. Contributed to and edited by a distinguished international team, this book recognizes the complex and contested nature of both sustainability and governance, and that these key concepts have been redefined considerably over time. As sustainability poses new and major challenges for the theory and practice of corporate governance, this book, ideal for postgraduate students of business and management, identifies and addresses these challenges.

Download or read book Essays in Corporate Governance written by Pedram Fardnia and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate governance is a heavily researched area in the finance literature, with previous studies exploring a multitude of variables that describe a firm's board structure, management, compensation, etc., and how they affect corporate decisions, firm performance, and various other aspects of corporate life. Corporate governance has important implications for nearly all business entities, yet many research questions within the field still remain unaddressed. In the first part of my thesis, I explore the relation between corporate governance practices and shareholder litigation. At the same time, I explore whether firms improve any shortcomings in their governance structure and/or governance practices post-litigation. We find evidence that variables that describe a firm's corporate governance, the compensation of its CEO, as well as the CEO's characteristics have a significant influence on the firm's litigation risk. Our results further show that, after a lawsuit, sued firms tend to improve their corporate governance and the proportion of their independent directors. In summary, our results provide important insights into the role of ex-ante active monitoring (via the board of directors) versus ex-post passive monitoring (via shareholder litigation), and how litigation as a passive monitoring device can cause firms to improve their active monitoring. In another research, I choose the aviation industry and examine the potential effects corporate governance policies may have on the safety record of that industry. Pilot errors and mechanical failures, which are responsible for 75% of all accidents, are, to some extent, preventable because they relate to the way an airline company is managed. My findings reveal that airline safety is significantly affected by a series of firm-level characteristics that describe an airline's governance as well as its financial well-being. In addition, I find that airline safety is affected by a variety of country-level factors that characterize the legal, institutional, and economic environment of a given country, as well as its air transport infrastructure. The results of this study have important policy implications for both the airline industry and regulators. To allocate resources more efficiently, regulators may find it beneficial to focus their supervision on airlines with poor governance practices as well as airlines that are in financial distress.

Download or read book Corporate Governance in Contention written by Ciaran Driver and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-10 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate governance is a complex idea that is often inappropriately simplified as a cookbook of recommended measures to improve financial performance. Meta studies of published research show that the supposed benign effects of these measures - independent directors or highly incentivised executives - are at best context-specific. There is thus a challenge to explain the meaning, purpose, and importance of corporate governance. This volume addresses these issues. The issues discussed centre on relationships within the firm e.g. between labour, managers, and investors, and relationships outside the firm that affect consumers or the environment. The essays in this collection are the considered selection by the editors and the contributors themselves of what are seen as some of the most weighty and urgent issues that connect the corporation and society at large in developed economies with established property rights. The essays are to be read in dialogue with each other, giving a richer understanding than could be obtained by shepherding all contributions into a single mould. Nevertheless taken together they demonstrate a shared sense of deep concern that the corporate governance agenda has been and still is on the wrong track. The contributors, individually and collectively, identify in this compendium both a research programme and a platform for change.

Download or read book Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility How to Tackle Environmental Imperatives in Company Law written by Christophe George and published by Stämpfli Verlag. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 954 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book first discusses the concepts of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and provides a new framework to deal with these issues in the context of sustainability. It then explores the requirements of "an end state of global sustainability" and subsequently moves to a detailed analysis of the current governance regime, delving into the CSR-related liabilities and incentives at stake for both corporations and their directors. It concludes with a framework suggesting that there are four normative avenues for addressing environmental and social imperatives in company law, which helps reflect on how to tackle the "potentiality for a sustainability gap" in corporate governance and CSR. The author always discusses practical realities and incentives, at both the policy and corporate levels, in addition to theoretical aspects. The thesis on which this book is based received the distinction "Summa Cum Laude" and the 2023 Law Faculty Prize from the University of Lausanne. Dr Christophe George is a Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research in the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Company Law and Management from the University of Lausanne, a Master of Law (LLM) from the University of Cambridge, a Master in Management from Harvard University, and a Master in Law and Economics from HEC Lausanne.

Download or read book Greening the Boardroom written by Grant Ledgerwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a world scale, the implicit deal between corporation and community is undergoing a revolution in the period 1990–2000. For the first time, corporate boardrooms are having to confront the environmental challenge not as a peripheral issue around "public relations", but as a core issue of credibility with its customers. As trust in big business has declined, consumer willingness to alter buying behaviour to register disapproval has accelerated. As a result, boardrooms in the largest companies are having to redraw their strategic procedures regarding the environment. This book aims to advance the general understanding of corporate environmental governance as an issue capable of separate and detailed analysis. It aims to provide not an overview, but a series of test cores into the generally unexamined issues surrounding the changing ethos of corporate action and environmental investment. To date, the "business and environment" strategic conversation has reached only a minute proportion of a global audience. Over the next twenty years, this dialogue will transform business into the 21st century. Moreover, it will become internalised into a way of working within Corporate Culture. Greening the Boardroom explores through case studies and surveys some of the changes in this process, in Europe as well as in Asia and North America. Suitable for readers in general management, business, government and academia, this book is an important contribution to the corporate environmental debate by the author of The Environmental Audit and Business Strategy: A Total Quality Approach.

Download or read book Essays on Governance and the Environment and Natural Resources written by Chenyang Xu and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation attempts to develop policies to help address environmental and natural resource issues from the perspectives of governance, both of firms and of regulatory agencies. On the governance of regulatory agencies, this dissertation specifically focuses on corruption in enforcement agencies. Many developing countries have established strict environmental and natural resource regulations, but the enforcement is weak if not almost absent. One key reason is corruption in enforcement agencies, notably with street-level bureaucrats. This dissertation attempts to devise new policies that help mitigate this corruption problem. On firm governance, this dissertation mainly focuses on mechanisms that reduce agency problems between managers and shareholders, i.e., corporate governance. The literature has found a significant effect of corporate governance on firms’ financial performance. This dissertation studies its impacts on firms’ environmental performance. Chapter 1 develops a new strategy of enforcing common-pool resource regulations that reduce social welfare loss due to corruption. Conventionally, inspectors are sent individually to inspect different regulated party simultaneously. Chapter 1 shows that in the presence of inspector corruption, grouping the inspectors together and let them inspect each regulated party successively may be welfare enhancing. Chapter 2 explores ways of mitigating corruption problems using tools from behavioral economics. In particular, it incorporates social influence into classical models of corruption deterrence. The objective is to examine how optimal anti-corruption enforcement policies would change when corruption behavior is subject to social influence. Results show, both theoretically and numerically, that social influence may either enhance or reduce the effectiveness of enforcement. Chapter 3 explores the effect of corporate governance—a set of mechanisms that reduce agency costs between managers and shareholders—on the cost of raising financial capital for abatement investment for compliance with environmental regulations. Empirical results show that different dimensions of corporate governance have heterogeneous impacts on the cost of capital: governance practices that shield CEOs from shareholder lawsuits have no effect on cost of capital and abatement investment decisions, while practices that are strong anti-takeover defenses increase the cost of capital and reduce abatement investment.

Download or read book Three Essays on Environmental Social and Governance written by Pang-Li Chen and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation seeks to deepen our understanding of environmental, social, and governance issues in finance. The first essay relates to the "E" component of ESG. It studies the consequences of an environmental reform that aims to make industrial land more redeployable by limiting purchasers' liability for past pollution. Existing research shows that strengthening liability for shareholders and creditors lessens their incentives to monitor the polluting firm, leading to worse environmental outcomes. Unlike shareholders and creditors, purchasers do not possess such "monitoring technology." However, purchaser liability can significantly affect corporate environmental activity by influencing the industrial land market. Thus, I investigate how purchaser liability influences industrial firms' pollution behavior in this essay. A fundamental concept in finance known as risk shifting suggests that companies engage in harm-shifting behavior when limited liability is more likely to bind. This means an inherent moral hazard problem is associated with financially distressed: distressed firms underinvest in pollution abatement because they are not responsible for the full cost of cleaning up environmental contamination. I conjecture that strengthening liability protection for purchasers mitigates this moral hazard problem by increasing the liquidity of industrial land. I empirically test this prediction using a difference-in-difference empirical design and detailed plant-level data. Consistent with this conjecture, I show that stronger liability protection for purchasers comes with substantial benefits of facilitating the trades of industrial land. Moreover, firms reduced pollution at treated plants following the reform. Importantly, the reduction is driven by financially distressed firms. My findings highlight a novel environmental benefit associated with reducing purchaser liability. The second essay studies the incentives of people that enforce environmental regulation. In particular, we explore how the government's incentive scheme impacts regulatory risk and pollution choices by regulated plants. We hypothesize that higher pay gaps between EPA attorneys and their superiors increase the monetary value of a promotion, which stimulates them to put more effort into enforcement activities. We test this prediction using a novel dataset on human resource data of all EPA attorneys between 1996 and 2016. We find that higher pay gaps among EPA attorneys increase the quantity and quality of enforcement cases. Moreover, we show that polluting firms respond to this heightened regulatory risk by reducing pollution and production. This paper highlights the cost and benefits of using the government's pay scheme to incentivize environmental regulators. The final essay relates to the "G" component of ESG. I show that boards rely on heuristics (i.e., rules-of-thumb) to allocate their monitoring efforts across their directorship firms. Classic theory on CEO turnover predicts that CEOs are more likely to be fired for performance when the board monitors the firm more intensely. Consistent with this prediction, I find that CEO turnover-performance sensitivity is positively associated with the fraction of directors for whom the current firm is the worst performer among their directorship firms. I argue this finding is consistent with boards using rank-dependent heuristics to allocate their monitoring effort. To bolster this interpretation, I show that directors are less likely to miss their worst-performing firm's board meetings compared to other directorship firms. Furthermore, the effect on CEO turnover-performance sensitivity is driven by board members responsible for monitoring the CEO, such as those sitting on monitoring committees. Finally, I show that relying on rank-dependent heuristics to allocate monitoring efforts leads to inefficient firing decisions. Overall, this essay documents an unknown cost of board interlock: firms that perform poorly relative to their director interlocks are subject to inefficient monitoring.

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility CSR of Entrepreneurial Firms written by Yefeng Wang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a broad management concern, it is not only critical to every aspect of modern business practice, but is also deeply incorporated into a company's daily operations via its values, norms, and decision-making process, etc. While there is an ever-increasing number of studies on CSR, many researchers have treated CSR as one single broad construct, its individual dimensions have been largely neglected. This dissertation takes the opportunity to address CSR by focusing on two dimensions: diversity and governance of three different entrepreneurial entities including clean-technology ventures, family firms in the United States and companies operate in emerging markets. In the first essay, I explore the impact of board diversity, female director representation, to be specific, on venture performance in the context of the clean-tech industry. I posit that appointing female board of directors can help clean-tech ventures overcome legitimacy constraints. I also examine the moderating effect of venture size and environmental ideology, such that this impact is stronger for small firms, and it is stronger for clean-tech ventures operating in a high level of environmental ideology state. In the second essay, I investigate how family involvement influences corporate diversity and how does corporate governance mechanism moderate such effect. The results suggest that family involvement decreases the overall corporate diversity, but family firms present more diversity-related concerns than non-family firms. Meanwhile, I suggest that the adoption of dual-class share decreases family firms' overall diversity. My third essay addresses the question of how corporate governance affect environmental information transparency directly and indirectly through seeking external verification, as well as how the legal and business environment moderates these relationships. I find that companies with strong corporate governance mechanisms are more likely to pursue external verification to alleviate traditional agency conflicts in the emerging markets. In addition, strong internal corporate governance leads to high environmental transparency directly and indirectly via seeking external verification. The legal and business environments moderate these relationships. Overall, these three essays in hopes of filling the gaps in the literature and advance the research in the areas of CSR, corporate governance, and entrepreneurship studies.

Download or read book Corporate Social Responsibility Sustainable Business written by Rae Lindsay and published by Kluwer Law International B.V.. This book was released on 2020-06-17 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a dramatic departure from its voluntary origins, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is rapidly shifting to hold multinational companies accountable for more than traditional shareholder performance. This CSR movement is embracing new environmental, social and governance (ESG) frameworks that both promote global sustainability goals and enhance accountability for negative impacts businesses can have on ‘planet and people’. This collection of essays by leading businesspeople, international civil servants, legal practitioners, academics, and other experts offers a forward-looking and pragmatic perspective that illuminates the major themes in this movement towards increasingly sustainable, transparent and accountable business practices. The collection shows how CSR has evolved to account for societal pressures, environmental, climate change and human rights impacts, international policy imperatives and the practical challenges of regulating commercial activity that transcends borders. The chapters offer an in-depth examination of current issues including: international frameworks and multistakeholder initiatives catalysing foundational change; the shifting emphasis on corporate imperatives to avoid harm to third parties; trends in CSR, focused on assuring the planet's future sustainability and social stability; regulatory initiatives around the globe, including Europe, North America, Asia and Africa; and extended accountability for activities of corporate group members and supply chains. The pressure and business case for companies to incorporate CSR into corporate governance is intensifying with each quarter, shareholder meeting, and regulatory agenda. The integration of CSR and new ESG frameworks into multinational corporate strategy and operations is key to sustainable business models that can generate long-term value for the organization and all stakeholders. Their acceptance as cornerstones of 21st century business practice appears inevitable. Taking full account of the imperative for companies and their lawyers to grapple with the practical and legal challenges in this area, this volume is an invaluable and pragmatic addition to the practitioners’ toolbox at this important juncture in an ever-more dynamic field.

Download or read book Essays on Corporate Governance and Social Responsibility written by Lukai Yang and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first essay, we study whether the increasingly large and concentrated ownership stakes by passive investors influence shareholders activism in the form of shareholder proposals. We find a positive association between passive ownership and the total number of proposals initiated, proposals with different types of sponsors, the rate of proposal withdrawal, vote-for percentage, and finally 1-year abnormal returns following the annual meeting date at which time the proposals were put forth. To mitigate endogeneity concerns, we use the Russell reconstitution as an exogenous shock. Our findings highlight the ability and power that passive investors have to affect corporate policy by supporting fellow shareholder sponsored proposals.In the second essay, we investigate the effectiveness of shareholder voice. In 2017, The Big Three institutional investors launched campaigns to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We estimate that their campaigns led firms to add at least 2.5 times as many female directors in 2019 as they had in 2016 and to promote female directors to key board positions. Firms increased female representation by relying less on managers existing networks to identify candidates and by placing less emphasis on candidates executive experience. Our results highlight index investors ability to influence firms governance structures and shareholder advocacy's potential to expand women's participation in corporate leadership more extensively than government mandates. In the third essay, we examine whether and how local religiosity has an impact on corporate attitude towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and how CSR activities directly impact firm value. Employing an extensive US sample from 1991 to 2015, we find that firms headquartered in more religious regions undertake a greater level of CSR activities. Furthermore, the CSR activities of firms located in highly religious regions are positively valued in the stock markets as we observe a positive association between CSR and Tobin's Q for the companies that are headquartered in high religious regions. The association is stronger when firms are less visible to non-local investors. This study enriches the emerging literature on the influence of local cultural factors on corporate behavior and encourages future research on the various aspects of how the local environment impacts firms ethical behaviors.

Download or read book Corporate Social Responsibility written by Daniel Brennan and published by Kluwer Law International B.V.. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current theory of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is developing along three interwoven lines - oral, social, and environmental. Although everybody recognizes that although CSR is of growing concern in a globalized economy, it being at the top of the board of director's agenda and also good for business, there is no sign of consensus on its rules, structures, or procedures. Now, this collection of essays by leading jurists, businesspeople, and academics takes a giant step toward a more cohesive and durable set of principles that can contribute to a cleaner environment and a better society while respecting and protecting the interests of all stakeholders.

Download or read book Governance in the Business Environment written by Guler Aras and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in association with the Social Responsibility Research Network, Volume 2 in this new and exciting series takes a global interdisciplinary perspective to the matter of governance in the business environment and includes key topics and contributions from the UK, Portugal, Belgium, Brazil, Japan, China and Malaysia.