Ownership and Corporate Governance across Institutional Contexts

• Date: 01 July 2020
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12334

Call for Papers

Corporate Governance: An International Review

Special Issue on

“Ownership and Corporate Governance across Institutional Contexts”

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2020

Guest Editors

Xavier Castañer, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Maria Goranova, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

Niels Hermes, University of Groningen, the Netherlands

Nikolaos Kavadis, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Alessandro Zattoni, LUISS University, Italy

BACKGROUND

Ownership is the foundation of corporate governance (Zattoni, 2011), as “no firm exists

without owners and the property rights allocated to these owners” (Aguilera & Crespí-

Cladera, 2016: 50). In the last several decades, the ownership fabric of corporations has

undergone a profound transformation (e.g., Kahle & Stulz, 2017). Individual investors,

entrepreneurs and their families, the once ubiquitous owners (Rydqvist, Spizman, &

Strebulaev, 2014), along with corporate investors, governmental ownership, and

foundations, have been joined by a cornucopia of organizational shareholders, such as

public and private pension funds, union-, mutual-, and hedge-funds, exchange-traded

funds (ETFs) and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). Globally, investment assets under

management exceeded $80 trillion in 2016 (Kelly, 2017), fueling corporate governance

and performance pressures on investment companies.

The purpose of this special issue forum is thus to encourage integrative research on

corporate ownership and how changes in corporate ownership composition affect

corporate governance, as well as to facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas across research

streams and communities traditionally focused on different institutional contexts. In

particular, we are interested in how the now more heterogeneous corporate ownership

structures affect corporate governance mechanisms and their effectiveness in different

countries.

Empirical evidence underlines the wide diversity of individual and organizational

ownership with respect to the type, such as founder, family, corporate, governmental and

institutional (Aguilera et al., 2015; Tihanyi et al., 2019; Wood & Wright, 2015), portfolio

characteristics of the investor (Bushee, 1998; Goranova, Dharwadkar, & Brandes, 2010),

activism propensity (Goranova et al., 2017), or the country of institutional origin (Kavadis

& Castañer, 2014; La Porta et al., 1998; Zattoni & Judge, 2012). Furthermore, prior

research finds that different types of organizational owners differ in their monitoring

effectiveness (Davis & Kim, 2007; Hoskisson et al., 2002) and in their pursuit of financial

versus non-financial goals (e.g., Gómez-Mejía et al., 2007).

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