The Oxford Handbook of
Corporate Governance
by Mike Wright (Editor),
Donald Siegel (Editor), Kevin Keasey (Editor), Igor Filatotchev (Editor)
The behavior of
managers-such as the rewards they obtain for poor performance, the role of
boards of directors in monitoring managers, and the regulatory framework
covering the corporate governance mechanisms that are put in place to ensure
managers' accountability to shareholder and other stakeholders-has been the
subject of extensive media and policy scrutiny in light of the financial crisis
of the early 2000s. However, corporate governance covers a much broader set of
issues, which requires detailed assessment as a central issue of concern to
business and society.
Critiques of traditional
governance research based on agency theory have noted its
"under-contextualized" nature and its inability to compare accurately
and explain the diversity of corporate governance arrangements across different
institutional contexts. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Governance aims at
closing these theoretical and empirical gaps. It considers corporate governance
issues at multiple levels of analysis-the individual manager, firms,
institutions, industries, and nations-and presents international evidence to
reflect the wide variety of perspectives. In analyzing the effects of corporate
governance on performance, a variety of indicators are considered, such as
accounting profit, economic profit, productivity growth, market share, proxies
for environmental and social performance, such as diversity and other aspects
of corporate social responsibility, and of course, share price effects. In
addition to providing a high level review and analysis of the existing
literature, each chapter develops an agenda for further research on a specific
aspect of corporate governance.
This Handbook constitutes
the definitive source of academic research on corporate governance,
synthesizing studies from economics, strategy, international business,
organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, business ethics, accounting,
finance, and law.
