Centre for Corporate Governance Research
The CCGR aims to produce high-quality research on how ownership and governance of firms impact value-creation and the welfare of firms’ stakeholders.
The CCGR aims to produce high-quality research on how ownership and governance of firms impact value-creation and the welfare of firms’ stakeholders.
The CCGR will be hosting the BI Conference on Corporate Governance for the fourth time on June 9, 2023. Program will be published soon.
CCGR annual report 2022 is now available. Read it here.
The paper "European sin stocks", has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Asset Management.
The paper "Are family firms reluctant to report impairment losses? Evidence from private firms", has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Accounting Research.
The paper "Governmental goals and the international strategies of state-owned multinational enterprises: a conceptual discussion", has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming in the Journal of Management and Governance.
The CCGR will co-host the Eier- og Styrekonferanse: «Bærekraft: Utfordringer og muligheter» on October, 20, 2021.
Bedrifter viderefører støtten til BI Centre for Corporate Governance Research
It has been announced that the EU proposal for legislation on sustainable corporate governance, which was expected to be presented in its final version in June, has been postponed. The Commission’s internal quality control raised a red flag on the proposal and the underlying report.
The CCGR joins colleagues from the European and Nordic legal and finance communities in their call for the EU to think again about recent proposals for corporate governance reform. The proposals are based on erroneous assumption and poor analysis, and risk doing substantial damage to European companies.
For å bidra til utvikling av fagmiljø og forskning innen selskapsrett arrangerer Institutt for rettsvitenskap og styring ved Handelshøyskolen BI selskapsrettslige morgenmøter, som et uformelt diskusjonsforum for selskapsrettslige problemstillinger.
The CCGR will co-host the Eier- og Styrekonferanse: «Bærekraft: Utfordringer og muligheter» on September, 22, 2020.
Nytt samarbeid mellom BI og Polyteknisk forening, bl.a. CCGR Eier-og Styrekonference 2020
The paper "Shareholder Illiquidity and Firm Behavior: Financial and Real Effects of the Personal Wealth Tax in Private Firms" by Janis Berzins, Øyvind Bøhren, Bogdan Stacescuhas been accepted to the Western Finance Association 2020 meetings in San Francisco.
The paper "Shareholder Illiquidity and Firm Behavior: Financial and Real Effects of the Personal Wealth Tax in Private Firms" by Janis Berzins, Øyvind Bøhren and Bogdan Stacescu were featured at ECGI.
The Centre for Corporate Governance Research is inviting applications for a doctoral scholarship in corporate governance, start date August 2020.
Øyvind Bøhren, who has been the CCGR’s founding director since 2005, retired on September 1, and professor Charlotte Østergaard is the new director of the CCGR.
The CCGR hosted the BI Conference on Corporate Governance for the third time on May 24, 2019. Eight leading scholars presented a new working paper.
CCGR decided to fund the three new projects "Family Firms, Networks, and Constraints", "The Effects of Firm Ownership Structure on Firm Performance: A Labor Market Channel" and "Conflicts in Private Family Firms".
The CCGR will be co-hosting BI’s annual Practitioner conference on corporate governance.
The paper "When does the Family Govern the Family Firm?", has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
New working paper "The Governance and Finance of Norwegian Family Firms: Main Characteristics of the Population”.
Salvatore Miglietta and Charlotte Ostergaard from BI’s Department of Finance, together with their coauthor Mike Burkart from the London School of Economics, received the Best Paper Award from the European Corporate Governance Institute on May 8 at the annual meeting in Berlin.
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Salvatore Miglietta and Charlotte Ostergaard from BI’s Department of Finance, together with their coauthor Mike Burkart from the London School of Economics, received the Best Paper Award from the European Corporate Governance Institute on May 8 at the annual meeting in Berlin. This prestigious award was given for their paper "Why Do Boards Exist? Governance Design in the Absence of Corporate Law".
The paper is part of an ongoing project financed by BI’s Centre for Corporate Governance Research (CCGR), entitled “Corporate Governance in a Free Contracting Environment”.
Professor Øyvind Bøhren receives BI's award for impact on society and research communication 2018. - Bøhren participates in many of the major business debates, has an international impact, and has sold 150,000 textbooks, the jury said.
The ECGI working paper “Dividends and Taxes: The Moderating Role of Agency Conflicts” was recently featured on the Oxford Business Law Blog.
The paper “Shareholder conflicts and dividends”, forthcoming in the Review of Finance, was recently featured on the blog of Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.
The CCGR co-hosted BI’s annual Practitioner conference on corporate governance.
The paper "Shareholder Conflicts and Dividends", has been accepted for publication in Review of Finance.
Øyvind Bøhren and Siv Staubo received the Best Paper Award from the European Financial Management Association.
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Øyvind Bøhren and Siv Staubo received the Best Paper Award from the European Financial Management Association in June 2017 for their paper "Mandatory Gender Balance and Board Independence".
The CCGR has decided to fund the project “Executive Compensation in Marketing”.
The CCGR will host the BI Conference on Corporate Governance for the second time on June 2, 2017. Eight leading international researchers will present new work, which will be discussed by prepared colleagues and the general audience. Participation is by invitation, only.
The CCGR co-hosted BI’s annual Practitioner conference on corporate governance.
The CCGR has decided to fund the two new projects “Capital Structure and Entrepreneurial Wealth“ and “The Impact of Managerial Biases on Firm Performance and Policies“.
The paper "Individual Entrepreneurial Exit and Earnings in Subsequent Paid Employment", has been accepted for publication in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.
The working paper "Education, Experience and Audit Effort" has been revised.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Governance structure and firm performance in private family firms" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Business Finance & Accounting.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Social Capital and the Viability of Stakeholder-Oriented Firms: Evidence from Savings Banks" has been accepted for publication in Review of Finance.
The CCGR hosted the first BI Conference on Corporate Governance on May 29, 2015.
The CCGR hosted the annual meeting of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) on May 8, 2015.
We are happy to announce that the paper "The expected return and valuation of private and public firms" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Financial Economics.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Initial Public Offering Allocations, Price Support, and Secondary Investors" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Økonomiske særtrekk ved stiftelser" has been accepted for publication in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Selskabsret.
The CCGR hosted this workshop on October 3 and 4, where researchers from European business schools presented and discussed twelve papers.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Mandatory Gender Balance and Board Independence" has been accepted for publication in European Financial Management.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Liquidity and Shareholder Activism" has been accepted for publication in Review of Financial Studies.
Liquidity and Shareholder Activism. This paper studies blockholders' incentives to intervene in corporate governance. Theory suggests activists may recoup expenses through informed trading of target firms' stock when stocks are liquid. The paper show that stock liquidity increases the probability of activism, but less so for potentially overvalued fi rms where privately informed blockholders may have greater incentives to sell their stake than to intervene. It also document that activists accumulate more stocks in targets the more liquid is the stock. The paper conclude that liquidity helps overcome the free-rider problem and induces activism via pre-activism accumulation of target firms' shares.
The CCGR solicited proposals for research projects in November 2013. Three proposals successfully passed the evaluation, and will have startup dates during spring 2014.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Does mandatory gender balance work? Changing organizational form to avoid board upheaval" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Corporate Finance.
We are happy to announce that the paper "The economics of minority freezeouts: Evidence from the courtroom" has been accepted for publication in International Review of Law and Economics.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Stakeholder Conflicts and Dividend Policy" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Banking and Finance.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Agency Conflicts and Auditing in Private Firms" has been accepted for publication in Accounting, Organizations, and Society.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Kjønnskvoterte styrer" has been accepted for publication in Praktisk Økonomi og Finans.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Power and trust in board–CEO relationships" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Management and Governance.
This paper examines how majority stockholders use the firm’s payout policy to influence this conflict in a large sample of Norwegian private firms. They find that the stronger the potential conflict between the stockholders as reflected by the firm’s ownership structure, the higher the proportion of earnings paid out as dividends. This tendency to reduce stockholder conflicts by dividend payout is more pronounced when the minority is weak and when a family’s majority block is held by a single individual. They also find evidence that a minority-friendly payout policy is associated with higher future minority investment in the firm. These results suggest that potential agency costs are mitigated by the firm’s dividend policy when the majority stockholder benefits in the longer run from not opportunistically exploiting the minority.
This paper studies the association between a firm’s cash holdings and its performance. Using a large sample of private companies, they find that the importance of cash for a firm’s performance varies substantially with its size and the conditions it faces. When there are negative shocks to industry or macroeconomic conditions, there is a positive association between cash holdings and performance for small firms. This association is much weaker for large firms. There is no association between cash holdings and performance for other types of conditions. Consistent with the benefits from cash holdings depending on a firm’s ability – and willingness – to use external financing, small firms borrow less than large firms during negative shocks.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Intens og kompakt" has been accepted for publication in Prosa.
We are happy to announce that the paper "A Strategic Deviance Perspective on the Franchise Form of Organizing" has been accepted for publication in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice.
This paper study how external financing costs affect the cash flow trade-offs made by nonlisted firms. The objective is two-fold: First, understand how nonlisted firms typically trade off financial, real, and distributive allocations; that is, how do they finance fluctuations in their cash flow. Little is known about corporate decision making in closely-held firms which do not have access to public equity and debt markets. Second, how shocks to the cost of external finance affect firms' cash flow trade-offset to what extent do they substitute between external and internal finance and to what extent do dividends and investments adjust?
This paper study how Tying Initial Public Offering (IPO) allocations of common stock to after-listing purchases in the IPO shares, a process referred to as IPO laddering, has resulted in large-scale investigations of the major investment banks by the SEC and the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). With a new and unique dataset of 16,593 IPO allocations on the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE), we confirm the SECs suspicion that IPO allocations are dependent on after-listing trading.
We are happy to announce that the paper "Governance and Politics: Regulating Independence and Diversity in the Board Room" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Finance & Accounting.
We are happy to announce that the CCGR working paper The Dual-Agency Problem Reconsidered - A Strategic Deviance Perspective on the Franchise Form of Organizing has been accepted for publication in the Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice.
This paper provide a detailed examination of auditor effort in various agency settings of privately held firms. Specifically, they measure the relation between abnormal audit fees and firm-level characteristics related to ultimate ownership and family relationships among shareholders, CEOs, and board members. Their results contribute to understanding agency costs for an economically important subset of firms (i.e., private companies) that have received limited attention in the literature.
This paper propose that a franchisor cannot assess and control opportunism without comparative information from plural form contractual arrangements provided by both franchisee relationships and operating its own units. Moving beyond dyadic perspectives, their strategic deviance model suggests why franchisors accept deviant behavior that results from vertical and horizontal agency problems.
The paper "Unoterte aksjeselskaper er viktige, uutforskede og spesielle" written by Janis Berzins and Øyvind Bøhren is published in "Praktisk Økonomi og Finans, nr. 2, 2009".
This paper documents that stock liquidity improves shareholders’ incentive to monitor management. Using a hand-collected sample of contested proxy solicitations and shareholder proposals as occurrences of shareholder activism, they find that poor firm performance increases the probability of shareholder activism and that this relationship is much stronger for firms with liquid stock than for other firms. The conclusion that liquidity improves monitoring is robust to different measures of firm performance and liquidity. They also document that target shareholders earn positive abnormal returns on the announcement date of activism and conclude that shareholder activism creates shareholder value.
We are happy to announce that the CCGR working paper "Auditor independence in a private firm and low litigation risk setting" has been accepted for publication in the Accounting Review. The authors Ole-Kristian Hope and John Christian Langli are the first to receive the CCGR grant of NOK 100.000 for publication in an A journal.
Two ongoing CCGR projects and seven project plans were presented and discussed. Info about the project types, titles, team leaders, team members, and project outlines, can be found under the "Projects" tab.
The CCGR solicited proposals for research projects in November 2008. Eight proposals successfully passed the evaluation, and will have startup dates during spring 2009.
This study analyzes a wide range of corporate finance and governance characteristics in all active Norwegian firms with limited liability, including about 77,000 nonlisted (private) firms and 135 listed (public) firms per year, over the period 1994-2005. The unexplored nature of nonlisted firms makes us address a large set of characteristics, and to focus more on describing overall patterns in the data rather than making elaborate tests of behavioral hypotheses.
This study analyzes corporate risk management with property insurance in small and medium sized firms that are privately held. The paper documents that the use of insurance relates positively to CEO salary and negatively to CEO ownership and ownership concentration.
Non-listed firms probably account for the largest portion of value creation and employment in virtually any country around the world. These firms are likely to evolve and utilize governance structures and to face specific financing challenges that are very different from those of publicly traded corporations. The objective of this international conference is to take some initial steps toward a better understanding of how privately held firms are governed and financed.
Seven teams presented and discussed their findings after about 15 months of research activity. Most of the teams are now close to having a working paper ready.
Although private firms predominate in the economy worldwide, there has been little, if any, prior research on auditor independence in a private firm setting. Ole-Kristian Hope and John Christian Langli investigate whether auditors are willing to sacrifice their independence in exchange for retaining clients that pay abnormally large fees for audit and/or non-audit services. Media exposure: Aftenposten, Den norske Revisorforening, NSM BI
Seven research teams presented and discussed the preliminary findings after half a year of research activity.
The objective of this kickoff event was to encourage cooperation and mutual support across the research teams. Each team presented its research plan, which was commented upon by a discussant and the general audience.
Triggered by a private gift to fund research projects and a chaired professorship in corporate governance, the Research Council of Norway (NFR) granted NOK 2.5 to the CCGR (socalled Gaveforsterking).
The CCGR granted financial support to three seed projects and ten regular projects.
Canica AS decided to support the research activities of the CCGR by a NOK 5 mill. grant.
The CCGR announced its intention to fund promising research in corporate governance by specifying key characteristics of a successful project description