Academic research shows that well-known principal-agent and capital market problems are strongly influenced by tax considerations. Against this background, this volume is the first to present a fully-fledged overview of the interdependence of tax and corporate governance. Not only the basic political, legal and economic questions but also major topics like income measurement, shareholding structures, corporate social responsibility and tax shelter disclosure are covered.

This sixth peer review of the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance analyses the corporate governance framework and practices relating to corporate risk management, in the private sector and in state-owned enterprises. The review covers 26 jurisdictions and is based on a general survey of all participating jurisdictions in December 2012, as well as an in-depth review of corporate risk management in Norway, Singapore and Switzerland. The report finds that while risk-taking is a fundamental driving force in business and entrepreneurship, the cost of risk management failures is often underestimated, both externally and internally, including the cost in terms of management time needed to rectify the situation. The reports thus concludes that corporate governance should ensure that risks are understood, managed, and, when appropriate, communicated.

Modern businesses and organizations understand that corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an important factor for sustainable success. At the same time CSR has established itself as a widely accepted element of courses in managerial training and education. This book, designed to support CSR teaching, collects 14 essays that clearly illustrate and explain the benefits and challenges of socially responsible corporate policies. Aligning theory and practice, the book focuses on four central themes: management, environment and sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and accounting and financial reporting. Business students and experienced managers alike will find this book a valuable resource that helps them to discover the strong forces that link successful management with corporate social responsibility.

...the relationship between employment growth and output growth...is greatly affected by the functioning, efficiency and institutional structure of the labor market. --Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist Despite the resumption of economic growth in most LAC countries since the late 1980s, improvements on the employment/unemployment front have been sluggish at best, with a few notable exceptions. In many countries, renewed growth in LAC in the 1990s has so far failed to generate adequate new jobs in place of those lost during the adjustment, and to restore wages to pre-crisis levels. The focus of this book is on: · the performance of labor markets in the LAC region since the beginning of significant structural reforms most countries in the region have undertaken · the structure of labor markets, institutions, and incentive structures; · the effects of that structure on employment, earnings, income distribution, and poverty levels; · the role of labor market institutions in labor market trends; · the options for reform and the benefits of comprehensive labor reforms, as evidenced inside and outside the region; · labor policy reforms to improve in a sustainable way the employment/unemployment outlook.

Abstract: "The authors jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. They argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model. "Nonrobustness" checks (which purposely exclude some indicators) support this argument. Using data from Argentina in the 1990s, their strongest and most robust results concern state ownership. State-owned banks have poor long-term performance (static effect), those undergoing privatization had particularly poor performance beforehand (selection effect), and these banks dramatically improved following privatization (dynamic effect. However, much of the measured improvement is likely due to placing nonperforming loans into residual entities, leaving "good" privatized banks."--World Bank web site.

Corporate Payout Policy synthesizes the academic research on payout policy and explains "how much, when, and how". That is (i) the overall value of payouts over the life of the enterprise, (ii) the time profile of a firm's payouts across periods, and (iii) the form of those payouts. The authors conclude that today's theory does a good job of explaining the general features of corporate payout policies, but some important gaps remain. So while our emphasis is to clarify "what we know" about payout policy, the authors also identify a number of interesting unresolved questions for future research. Corporate Payout Policy discusses potential influences on corporate payout policy including managerial use of payouts to signal future earnings to outside investors, individuals' behavioral biases that lead to sentiment-based demands for distributions, the desire of large block stockholders to maintain corporate control, and personal tax incentives to defer payouts. The authors highlight four important "carry-away" points: the literature's focus on whether repurchases will (or should) drive out dividends is misplaced because it implicitly assumes that a single payout vehicle is optimal; extant empirical evidence is strongly incompatible with the notion that the primary purpose of dividends is to signal managers' views of future earnings to outside investors; over-confidence on the part of managers is potentially a first-order determinant of payout policy because it induces them to over-retain resources to invest in dubious projects and so behavioral biases may, in fact, turn out to be more important than agency costs in explaining why investors pressure firms to accelerate payouts; the influence of controlling stockholders on payout policy --- particularly in non-U.S. firms, where controlling stockholders are common --- is a promising area for future research. Corporate Payout Policy is required reading for both researchers and practitioners interested in understanding this central topic in corporate finance and governance.

This book begins by analysing the various corporate governance mechanisms explored in the extant literature and determining their effectiveness in enhancing the firm value using multivariate analysis. The findings are of global relevance as the corporate governance regulations of most countries focus on independent directors as the mainstay of good governance. The empirical evidence from the first objective of this study corroborates the claim that independent directors do not strengthen the firms’ governance quality. The book is one of the few works to have analysed the possible reasons behind the ineffectiveness of the independent directors. Also, in view of the famous concept of the bundle of governance mechanisms, it might be possible that the independent directors strengthen the firms’ governance quality indirectly by strengthening other governance mechanisms. This aspect too has little precedence. This study adopts a novel moderation and mediation approach to analyse the monitoring behaviour of independent directors in relation to other governance mechanisms. The work is a must read for corporate players as well as researchers and scholars studying this discipline.