2012 Best Paper Awards Announcement

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12030
• Date: 01 July 2013
• Published date: 01 July 2013

2012 Best Paper Awards Announcement

Please join us in congratulating the authors of the award-winning papers published in 2012 (volume 20) 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 2012 in CGIR.

Using these 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 confront-

ing corporations from their respective regions all over the world or are leading lights in corporate gover-

nance scholarship. Of the 31 articles published last year amongst the 414 submitted to CGIR, eight were

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

We formed an awards committee comprising three exceptional scholars serving on our Editorial Review

Board. In keeping with our emphasis on diversity of perspective, they collectively represent diverse func-

tional backgrounds. Specif‌ically, the three distinguished members of the awards committee were: Aleksan-

dra Gregoric (Finance/Denmark), Till Talaulicar (Management/Germany), and Hans van Ees (Economics/

the Netherlands).

The committee was charged with ranking all eligible papers for their rigor and relevance to international

corporate governance issues. While this was an extremely challenging task, there was a rather strong

consensus on studies that made the most signif‌icant contributions to the international corporate governance

literature. Based on the committee’s rankings, we are pleased to announce the 2012 best paper and

runner-up awards.

The 2012 best paperaward goes to Bruce Seifert and Halit Gonenc for their cross-nationalempirical study of

the relationships between creditor rights and R&D expenditures. Using a sample of 21,000 f‌irms from 41

countries, the study shows that strong creditor rights are associated with reduced R&D intensity. Their

analysisemphasizes that this relationship can be observed in market-based countries – but not in bank-based

countries – and is stronger for f‌irms facing f‌inancial distress. The following is a nominating comment by

Diane Denis, a distinguished member of our editorial advisory board, on the contribution made by this

particular research study:

“It is a nicely done paper with quite interesting results – and I think that both creditor issues and R&D

expenditures are important topics that do not get as much attention in the governance literature as they perhaps

should.”

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

follows:

Seifert, Bruce & Gonenc, Halit 2012. Creditor rights and R&D expenditures. Corporate Governance: An

International Review, 20(1): 3–20.

The runner-up award winner for 2012 was co-authored by Nongnit Chancharat, Chandrasekhar Krishna-

murti and Gary Tian. Exploring 125 Australian new economy f‌irms listed between 1994 and 2002, they f‌ind

that board independence is an antecedent of corporate survival. They also show that this relationship is

nonlinear as the benef‌its of board independence increase at a decreasing rate.

Ken Merchant, an internationally recognized governancescholar serving on our advisory board who nomi-

nated this study, made this nominating comment:

“I think this paper is directly relevant to CGIR’s mission. The study presents interesting data, including longitu-

dinal data, on the effect of board structure on the survival rates of new economy IPO f‌irms. This is a nice test with

some conf‌irming f‌indings and some f‌indings worthy of further investigation. Altogether, well done.”

The “Runner-Up Article Award” citation is as follows:

Chancharat,Nongnit, Krishnamurti, Chandrasekhar & Tian, Gary Tian 2012. Boardstructure and survival of

new economy IPO f‌irms. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 20(2): 144–63.

Thanks go to our nominators and evaluators for this year’s award selection process. Congratulations go to

these authors for their signif‌icant contributions to the international corporate governance literature. We

encourage everyone to read these articles and consider submitting their own work in future editions of

CGIR, which is growing in reach, exposure, and inf‌luence every year!