Abstract Chief executive officer (CEO) compensation is a potent instrument through which people and investors can improve their understanding of organization substance and symbol. Good compensation package can not only improve the performance of worker but also lift employees¡¦ commitment to work. However, we are not so sure about the positive association between CEO compensation and firm performance because of the existing of ¡§agency theory¡¨. The degrees of alignment of interests with those of the agents in the firm who control the major decisions in the firm are also different. This gives rise to potential conflicts among the stakeholders, and these incentive conflicts have now come to know as ¡§agency (principal-agent) problem¡¨. Being desirous of the problem, this thesis reviews and integrates the literature on CEO compensation, focusing on both determinants and consequences of this complex, often controversial phenomenon. Thus, a model of the determinants of CEO compensation is presented and investigated. Based on a sample of 422 from Taiwan listed companies, I investigated the data both from Taiwan Economic Journal (TEJ) and the annual report of each listed company to combine in order to examine the compensation model. The definition of CEO in this thesis is one of the following three identities: chairmen of the board, general managers, and people who serve as both positions, that is, CEO duality. Hypotheses are tested and the study finds that CEO compensation has complex links to several factors: firm sizes, performance, stock return, and board stock ownership. The main factors for deciding CEO compensation are economic determinants and the only significant board control variable is board stock ownership. Contrary to some foreign literature, the index of duality is not significant at all since that people who serve as both chairmen and general manager obtain below average compensation level than others. In summary, the thesis provides the different results of a matrix of different identities and industries, and hopes to have some contribution to following research.

Abstract Since the Asian financial crisis in 1997, several researches for the East Asian have found that concentration of ownership higher than other areas and weak corporate governance have been important reasons of financing crisis. Therefore, the study adopts the method developed by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes and Shleifer (1999), which traces the chain of ownership to find who has the most voting rights, identifies their ultimate control patterns, finds the controlling shareholders of firm, and then calculates each ultimate owner¡¦s control rights and cash flow rights. We also try to find the relationship between those ways of controlling shareholders to the voting rights, cash flow rights, and the degree of control rights deviating from cash flow rights. In Addition, we regress to the Proxy Q on controlling shareholders¡¦ control rights deviating from cash flow rights, then examine the evidence on expropriation of minority shareholders. This paper investigates whether the board construction on corporate governance mechanism effectively discharge its monitoring function and mitigate central agency problem. The research data are collected from the publications of those companies that stocks are openly traded on the Taiwan Stock Market between 2000 and 2003 April. There are 183 validated observations which are obtained. Empirical result suggests¡G 1. The high concentration of ownership is more common in Taiwan publicly listed companies and those firms are typically controlled by families. 2. The controlling shareholders typically have power over firms significantly in excess of their cash flow rights because they through the use of pyramids, cross-holdings, paper company and participation in management. And the condition of family control company is the worst. 3. The more the controlling shareholders¡¦ cash flow rights, the better performance of the firm. 4. For Taiwan publicly listed companies, the corporate governance mechanism could not effectively discharge its monitoring function and mitigate central agency problem.

In Alternext, companies could choose two different kinds of IPO mechanisms; one is Public Offer, and the other is Private Placement. In fact, Private Placement in Alternext means 100% book-building. This article focused on what kind of companies would intend to choose Private Placement other than Public Offer, and compared their IPO discounts and market performance with companies using another mechanism. Companies with low profitability and no family holding would prefer to use Private Placement. However, companies with highly information asymmetry and profitability would also choose Private Placement. From the view of post-IPO liquidity, we infer that companies that choose Private Placement may be due to their preference for long-term investors. Referring to IPO indirect cost, we found that companies choosing Private Placement pay higher IPO discount cost. However, their post-IPO cumulated abnormal returns (CAR) are higher than companies using Public Offering.

Financial statement quality can directly affect investor confidence. Corporate governance in well-functioning mechanisms can improve Financial statement quality. Recently, in order to enhance corporate governance performance, avoid financial fraud, and protect investors, the government constantly amend the related rules. Financial fraud is most through misstated financial reports, and even fraudulent misstatement may result from financial statement restatement. The purpose of the study is to examine whether ownership structure, board of director composition, and audit quality in corporate governance are associated with financial statement restatement. Empirical results show that in ownership structure the higher stock proportion of the institutional investors, the probability of financial statement restatement is higher. It is consistent with conflict of interest hypothesis. In audit quality, the enterprises have lower occurrence rates of financial statement restatement while they hire the big 4 accounting firms to audit their financial statements. Furthermore, when accounting firms provide non-audit services to their audit clients, the higher significance of non-audit fees, occurrence rates of financial statement restatement are higher.

I examine the influence of ownership structure on labor decisions by comparing how public and private banks manage their labor costs. I find that, compared to private banks, public banks grow their labor force by more when activity increases. However, due to capital market pressure, managers of public banks reduce labor costs to avoid reporting earnings declines while private banks increase labor costs around the same benchmark. In particular, I find that managers of public banks reduce labor costs to avoid reporting an earnings decline when they have diversified lines of business or when they do not make use of alternative methods of earnings management. Furthermore, public banks that reduce labor costs and report a small earnings increase experience improved subsequent performance. Overall these findings suggest that financial reporting pressure in public firms can constrain empire building by incentivizing managers to make strategic cost cuts.

Stock splits are supposed to be financial cosmetics. However, this study shows that such corporate events have impact on ownership structure. This study exploits unique data from Swedish Central Security Registration regarding ownership and analyzes the ownership structures in stock splitting firms. Our data consists of exclu-sive semi-annually reported ownership structures of companies listed on Stockholm Stock Exchange. We categorize stock owners as domestic institutional investors, foreign investors and domestic individual investors. The information on ultimate ownership composition in listed companies is rare and more or less exquisite for Sweden.Our results confirm positive abnormal returns surrounding the announcement of stock splits and stock dividends. Moreover, we find evidence on changes in owner-ship structure as well as number of shareholders. The results show evidence on decreasing ownership concentration due to the stock split, which implies a more dispersed ownership structure.

Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2007.

Banks play a primary role in the intermediation of savings and investments. As a result, the stability and development of the financial sector is of paramount importance to most countries. In developed countries, the global financial crisis which led to the shocking collapse of Lehman Brothers and distress in other global financial giants such as AIG, Merrill Lynch, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Northern Rock have raised concerns about corporate governance in the financial sector and more specifically, the importance of a stable banking sector worldwide. In developing countries, financial systems are heavily reliant on banking firms since they are the largest intermediaries. The institutional environment which includes substantial ownership by insider owners, poor legal and regulatory systems, corruption and the existence of distributional cartels underscore the need for effective regulation and sound corporate governance aimed at curbing excessive risk taking by owners. The effects of different ownership structures on banks have received little attention particularly in developing countries. Literature suggests that whether the ownership rights of a bank are held by just a few shareholders or by many and whether these shareholders are insiders or outsiders has differing effects on corporate governance. This study analyses the effects of ownership structure on corporate governance in Zimbabwean banks. The Zimbabwean banking sector has experienced major changes since the liberalisation of the financial markets in 1991. The sector expanded due to the entry of a significant number of private indigenous banks in a market previously dominated by foreign banks. Following this expansion, the sector suffered a near-systemic crisis in 2003 which resulted in the collapse of 13 of these newly registered banks and the arrest of several owner managers for abusing depositor’s funds. After the financial sector crisis, the central bank implemented new corporate governance regulations in 2004 which introduced a separation between ownership and management. The objective of the regulation was to address the problems relating to insider ownership concentration address corporate governance weaknesses in banks. The findings from this study indicate ownership concentration in all the banks across ownership types, and insider ownership concentration in private indigenous banks before and after the 2004 regulations. The empirical evidence also find that banks with insider ownership concentration suffered corporate governance weaknesses which resulted in problems such as related party transactions, frauds, tunnelling and abuse of depositor’s funds compared to those with outside ownership concentration. In this regard, the study finds that in developing countries, insider ownership concentration may result in corporate governance weaknesses whilst outsider ownership concentration can result in increased monitoring. The study also finds evidence of a weak legal and regulatory framework, poor enforcement and regulatory forbearance as some of the institutional arrangements which affected ownership structure and corporate governance in banks. The analysis in this study also indicate that the regulatory changes introduced by the central bank in 2004 have not been ineffective in tackling the corporate which resulted from insider ownership concentration. As a result, the study questions the a wholesome adoption of Anglo-Saxon type provisions relating to separation between ownership and management without an empirical analysis of their appropriateness to developing countries in developing countries.

Magister Economicae - MEcon / China has embarked on a wide range of economic reforms in the past thirty years. One of the major reforms was to restructure state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into public listed companies (PLCs) to improve the performance and quality of corporate governance of SOEs. However, the unique phenomenon of China’s equity market is that the state continues to hold a controlling stake in PLCs with less than 40% of shares tradable in the stock market. This seriously affects the performance and quality of corporate governance of China’s PLCs. This mini-thesis investigates the effects of split-share structure reform on SOEs in China, with particular focus on an analysis of the relationship between ownership structure and firm performance of listed companies. By using a sample of the top 50 companies based on the ranking of the 2004 Fortune top 100 PLCs, a negative correlation was found between the state ownership structure and firm performance of China PLCs before the announcement of split-share structure reform. However, by using the same samples and techniques, the analysis shows that the improvement in the diversified ownership structure had a positive impact on firm performance in China PLCs after the reform.

The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding of how senior management executives experience insider ownership. An additional aim is to investigate if there is a difference of the experiences of senior management executives with a Swedish cultural background in comparison to the experiences of senior management executives with other cultural backgrounds, with regards to insider ownership. By distribution of a questionnaire, partly through telephone interviews and in part via email, empirical primary data is gathered. The empirical findings indicate that insider ownership has a broad area of use and that senior management executives experience insider ownership as a source of motivation. Further, the study indicates that insider ownership is experienced as a motivational source regardless of cultural background since the study sees tendencies of that personal characteristics outweigh the cultural permeation. The findings of this study imply tendencies that show many different positive effects of insider ownership. For example, insider ownership could be a motivational source, a governance tool for creating trust among employees and other interlinked stakeholders. This could in turn mean that insider ownership contributes to a more cooperative working environment. Also, insider ownership has been portrayed as a possible catalyst for increased motivation. Thus, insider ownership could be a source for increased individual performance, and thus, company performance. Additionally, one of the major findings of this study is the tendencies that could prove to be of interest for future research, for example; that the feeling of fear might be superior to the feeling of greed