Ownership and Corporate Governance across Institutional Contexts

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12315
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020

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).

Therefore, it is important to study and understand the implications of heterogeneous

shareholders with broadly speaking different interests, views, and priorities with respect to

corporate governance mechanisms. For instance, what are the consequences for corporate

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