Taking stock of corporate governance research and future research opportunities

• Author: Till Talaulicar,Konstantinos Stathopoulos
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12356
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020

EDITORIAL

Taking stock of corporate governance research and future

research opportunities

1|INTRODUCTION

Research on corporate governance is more popular than ever, and its

volume continues to increase tremendously. A clear indicator of this is

the steep rise in the number of articles submitted to Corporate Gover-

nance: An International Review (CGIR), which this year exceeded

700 submissions for the first time in the 28-year history of the journal.

CGIR's mission is to publish cutting-edge international research on the

phenomena of corporate governance throughout the global economy.

We define corporate governance broadly as the exercise of power

over corporate entities so as to increase the value provided to the

organization's various stakeholders, as well as make those stake-

holders accountable for acting responsibly with regard to the protec-

tion, generation, and distribution of wealth invested in the firm.

Corporate governance research is conducted intensively all over

the world, built on a broad variety of theories, and based on various

methodological approaches to develop and substantiate new insights.

The international scope of corporate governance research is indicated

by the diverse set of governance environments studied in recent CGIR

articles that include Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Indone-

sia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United

Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam, as well as multicountry

studies (e.g., Deloof, Du, & Vanacker, 2020; Desender, LópezPuertas-

Lamy, Pattitoni, & Petracci, 2020; García-Sánchez & García-

Meca, 2018; Lazzarini & Musacchio, 2018; Qian, Cao, & Cao, 2018;

Tribó, 2019; Zhou & Guillén, 2019). Corporate governance research is

by no means restricted to the average publicly held corporation but

also deals with the unique challenges associated with specific types of

firms like, for instance, audit firms (La Rosa, Caserio, & Bernini, 2019),

banks (Sheedy & Griffin, 2018), business groups (Shin, Hyun, Oh, &

Yang, 2018), closely held firms (Russino, Picone, & Dagnino, 2019),

declining firms (Abebe & Tangpong, 2018), entrepreneurial ventures

(Pérez-Calero, Larrañeta, & Wright, 2019), family firms (Yeh &

Liao, 2019), foundations (Thomsen, Poulsen, Børsting, & Kuhn, 2018),

institutional investors (Semenova & Hassel, 2019), intergovernmental

organizations (Federo & Saz-Carranza, 2018), initial public offerings

(IPOs) (González, Guzmán, Tellez-Falla, & Trujillo, 2019), as well as

state-owned enterprises (Apriliyanti & Randøy, 2019). This research

intensity demonstrates the spread of corporate governance studies in

multiple disciplines but also leads to higher levels of fragmentation of

the field. In order to take stock of this increasing breadth and diversity

of research, review articles are essential because they consolidate and

advance extant knowledge of subjects relevant to the audience of

CGIR, that is, corporate governance scholars, practitioners, as well as

policymakers.

Prior to the present issue, CGIR had already published two review

issues: issue 3 of 2009 (Filatotchev & Boyd, 2009) and issue 3 of

2016 (Aguilera, Florackis, & Kim, 2016). While review articles can be

submitted to CGIR anytime, we are now pursuing a policy of publish-

ing a review issue biyearly. This is in response to the immense

increase in the generation of knowledge in this research area. Articles

considered for inclusion in the review issue are selected in a two-step

process. In response to an open call for proposals, CGIR evaluates

each proposal's suggested theme and intended contribution. We

select a set of subjects and invite the authors to prepare and submit

full review articles that are subject to the standard double-blind

review process applied at CGIR. The due date to submit proposals for

the review issue 2022 is March 1, 2021. The full call for proposals

with more details can be found at the end of the current issue as well

as on the CGIR webpage.

Our present review issue 2020 contains six first-rate articles that

cover a broad set of highly relevant subjects including the role of differ-

ent types of owners with regard to board governance (Federo,

Ponomareva, Aguilera, Saz-Carranza, & Losada, 2020), the position of

the chair of the board of directors (Banerjee, Nordqvist, &

Hellerstedt, 2020), idiosyncrasies of founder CEOs (Abebe, Li,

Acharya, & Daspit, 2020), the relationship between board and top

management team (TMT) characteristics and technological innovation

(Kurzhals, Graf-Vlachy, & König, 2020), the institutional embeddedness

of corporate governance (Zattoni, Dedoulis, Leventis, & Van Ees, 2020),

as well as the relationship between different types of ownership and

the propensity of tunneling (Solarino & Boyd, 2020). With one excep-

tion that employs meta-analysis (cf. Geyskens, Krishnan, Steenkamp, &

Cunha, 2009), the articles are developed and substantiated based on

systematic and rigorous reviews of the literature (cf. Booth, Sutton, &

Papaioannou, 2016; Snyder, 2019; Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart, 2003).

In the following paragraph, we provide a synopsis of the review issue

and briefly introduce the articles selected for inclusion.

2|OVERVIEW OF THE PRESENT REVIEW

ISSUE

The separation of ownership and control has been widely studied as

one of the major causes of why corporate governance is important. In

contrast to some earlier notions, there is now awareness that owners

DOI: 10.1111/corg.12356

344 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Corp Govern Int Rev. 2020;28:344–347.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/corg