2011 Best Paper Awards Announcement

• Published date: 01 July 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8683.2012.00917.x
• Date: 01 July 2012

2011 Best Paper Awards Announcement

Please join us in congratulating the authors of the award-winning papers published in 2011 (volume 19) of

Corporate Governance: An International Review (CGIR). The nomination criteria included the following three

standards: (1) the research question and f‌indings must be highly relevant to practitioners and/or policy-

makers, (2) the research study must be both theoreticallyand methodologically rigorous, and (3) the research

publication must be published in 2011 in CGIR.

Using these three criteria, nominations were made by members of our distinguished Editorial Advisory

Board (EAB) – many of whom have direct, f‌irst-hand working experience in dealing with the challenges

confronting corporations from their respective regions all over the world or are leading lights in corporate

governance scholarship. Of the 31 articles published last year amongst the 400 submitted to CGIR, six were

nominated to be considered for our best paper distinction by EAB members.

Next, I convened an awards committee that comprised three exceptional scholars serving on our Editorial

Review Board whose judgment I have come to respect over the years. In keeping with our emphasis on

diversity of perspective, they collectively represent diverse geographic and functional backgrounds. Spe-

cif‌ically, the three distinguished members of the awardscommittee were: Alessandro Zattoni (Management/

Italy), Praveen Kumar (Finance/USA), and Gavin Nicholson (Accounting/Australia).

While this wasan extremely challenging task, there was a fairly strong consensus on which studies made the

largest contributions to the international corporate governance literature. Therefore, the 2011 best paper

award goes to Johanne Grosvold and Stephen Brammer for their cross-national empirical study of the

inf‌luence of nationalinstitutional context on female representation on boardsof directors. Using institutional

theory, they show that nearly half of the variance in board gender diversity is explained by formal and

informal national institutions.

Listed below is a nominating comment by Christine Mallin, a former editor of CGIR and a distinguished

member of our editorial advisory board, on the contribution made by this particular research study:

The focus of this article, board diversity, is very topical. I thought that this article was very well executed and its

f‌indings, based on an analysis of 38 countries, are relevant to policymakers in both national and international

contexts. The authors are to be commended on an excellent paper.

A member of the f‌inal selection committee characterized the article as follows:

For me, this paper stood out on a variety of dimensions: the originality of the question and the approach to the test

design; the breadth and f‌lexibility of the conceptual frameworks traversed; the data; the empirical methodology; and

the subtlety of analysis and import of conclusions. It is a truly “deep” paper.

This “Best Paper Award” article maybe now accessed for free on our journal’s website, and its citation is as

follows:

Grosvold, Johanne & Brammer, Stephen 2011. Nationalinstitutional systems as antecedents of female board

representation: An empirical study. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 19(2): 116–135.

The runner-up award winner for 2011 was co-authored by Maureen Muller-Kahle and Krista Lewellyn for

their empirical investigation of the relationship between board conf‌igurations and subprime lending prac-

tices in US f‌inancial institutions prior to the US f‌inancial crisis. Using a group decision-making perspective,

these governancescholars empirically demonstrated that subprime lenders had boards thatwere busier, had

less tenure, and possessed less gender diversity than lenders who did not materially offer subprime loans.

James Westphal, an internationally-recognized governance scholar serving on our advisory board who

nominated this study, made this nominating comment:

This paper offers rare and compelling evidence for a signif‌icant effect of board diversity on strategic decision making

by examining an outcome that has received little systematic attention in the strategy literature, namely the extent

of subprime lending. The result is a valuable contribution to multiple literatures, including diversity in corporate

leadership, board composition, and behavioral corporate f‌inance.