2013 Best Paper Awards Announcement

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12074
• Date: 01 July 2014
• Published date: 01 July 2014

2013 Best Paper Awards Announcement

Please join us in congratulating the authors of the award-winning papers published in 2013

(volume 21) 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 policymakers; (2) the research study must be both theoretically

and methodologically rigorous; and (3) the research publication must be published in 2013 in

CGIR.

Using these criteria, nominations were made by members of our distinguished Editorial Advi-

sory 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 governancescholarship. Of the 30 articles published last year amongst

the 458 submitted to CGIR, six 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 functional and national backgrounds. Specifically, the three distinguished

members of the awards committee were: Huimin Chung (Finance/Taiwan), Steve Gove

(Management/USA), and Andrea Melis (Accounting/Italy).

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 2013 best paper and runner-up awards.

The 2013 best paper award goes to Katja Rost and Antoinette Weibel for their empirical study on

social norms and current CEO pay. Testing the theoretical model using a vignette-survey on a

sample of 8,000 Swiss citizens, the study shows that individual differences (e.g., status attributes

and moral development) lead to perceptions of norms infringement. Their results emphasize that

the willingness to punish firms with infringing norms on CEO pay is driven by low cost pun-

ishment opportunities and feelings of deprivation. The following is a nominating comment by Bill

Judge, the previous editor-in-chief of CGIR and a distinguished member of our editorial advisory

board, on the contribution made by this particular research study:

“This study examined how people in the streets of Switzerland perceived the CEO compensation

practices in Swiss firms. This is very topical and highly relevant. In addition, they found that the social

status and moral development of the respondents influenced their perceptions. These findings have

powerful implications for public policymakers, compensation consultants, and board members on a

highly charged governance issue. I commend these authors for taking an unusual methodological and

theoretical approach to a topic of central importance to the field of corporate governance.”

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

is as follows:

Rost, K. & Weibel, A. 2013. CEO pay from a social norm perspective: The infringement

and reestablishment of fairness norms. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 21(4):

351–72.

The runner-up award winner for 2013 was co-authored by Terry McNulty, Chris Florackis and

Phillip Ormrod. Their study explores the relationship between board processes and corporate

financial risk. Using data from a questionnaire survey with answers from 141 board chairs

of large UK companies, the study shows that board processes (i.e., effort norms, cognitive