This paper investigates whether shareholder lockup agreements in France and Germany mitigate problems of agency and asymmetric information. Despite minimum requirements in terms of the length and percentage of shares locked up, lockup agreements are not only highly diverse across firms but also across the different shareholders of a single firm as most firms have different agreements in place for executives, non-executives and venture capitalists. The diversity across firms and types of shareholders can be explained by firm characteristics—such as the level of uncertainty—as well as the type and importance of each shareholder within the firm.

This paper summarizes the key results of the papers published in this special issue as well as highlights recent developments in the related literature. The special issue includes papers on CEO successions, the boards of directors of financial institutions, board independence, gender balance and directors' networks.

This paper is the first study on the effects of pay–performance sensitivity (PPS) on the performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the presence of social ties and family ties of the top managers with board members. We find that both social ties and family ties increase PPS. In turn, PPS improves IPO performance. More importantly, greater PPS increases the positive effect of social ties on IPO performance whereas it reduces the negative effect of family ties.

This paper studies the two potentially contrasting effects on IPO pricing and post-IPO operating performance of family ties as well as social ties the top management has with board members. While family ties may solve manager–owner conflicts of interests, they may also give rise to minority-shareholder expropriation and/or private benefits of control. Similarly, social ties may either create value or lead to entrenchment and excessive managerial power. Using q-analysis to measure the strength of top manager ties to board members, we find that IPO performance is positively related to the strength of social ties, but negatively to the strength of family ties. We also find that, controlling for social ties, board independence affects both IPO pricing and post-IPO operating performance. Further, we show that the association between IPO performance and ties depends on whether they are with inside or outside directors.

This paper examines the impact of CEO IPO option grants on IPO underpricing. Contrary to Lowry and Murphy (2007) who do not find a relationship between the two, this paper finds such a relationship when board independence, the power of the CEO and venture capitalists (VCs) are taken into account. The results are threefold. First, powerful CEOs are able to reap substantial gains from IPO options, to the detriment of the shareholders. Second, young, powerful VCs use IPO option grants to bribe the CEO to agree to an early IPO which will leave more of the existing shareholders' money on the table. Finally, IPO options only work as a value-enhancing incentive in the presence of strong boards.

We review the existing literature on managerial compensation, with particular reference to the two contrasting views about its main driver. On the one hand, managerial compensation is seen to be the result of a market-based mechanism which ensures that managers have adequate incentives to maximize shareholder value. On the other hand, it is regarded to be a means whereby self-serving executives skim corporate profits and expropriate shareholders. We find that most of the existing literature supports the latter view as executives tend to benefit from windfall earnings and are able to extract rents in the presence of weak corporate governance.

This paper explains the choice of the cross-listing location with particular emphasis on the level of investor protection provided by the host market. We find that firms with concentrated control, with a higher level of risk and those with more pronounced financing needs cross-list on a market with better investor protection. We also find support for the bonding hypothesis as firms from markets with weak shareholder protection tend to cross-list on markets with significantly higher shareholder protection.

Companies have the choice to deviate from their national corporate governance standards by opting into another system. They can do so via contractual devices – such as cross-border mergers and acquisitions, (re)incorporations, and cross-listings – which enable them to choose their preferred level of investor protection and regulation. This paper reviews these three main contractual governance devices, their effect on value, and whether their adoption by firms induces a race to the bottom or a race to the top. Indeed, firms may opt for less shareholder-orientation or investor protection (shareholder-expropriation hypothesis) rather than for more stringent rules that require firms to focus on shareholder value (bonding hypothesis).

This paper investigates whether investment spending of firms is sensitive to the availability of internal funds. Imperfect capital markets create a hierarchy for the different sources of funds such that investment and financial decisions are not independent. The relation between corporate investment and free cash flow is investigated using the Bond and Meghir [Review of Economic Studies, 61 (1994a) 197] Euler-equation model for a panel of 240 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange over a 6-year period. This method allows for a direct test of the first-order condition of an intertemporal maximisation problem. It does not require the use of Tobin's q, which is subject to mismeasurement problems. Apart from past investment levels and generated cash flow, the model also includes a leverage factor which captures potential bankruptcy costs and the tax advantages of debt. More importantly, we investigate whether ownership concentration by class of shareholder creates or mitigates liquidity constraints. When industrial companies control large shareholdings, there is evidence of increased overinvestment. This relation is strong when the relative voting power (measured by the Shapley values) of the combined equity stakes of families and industrial companies and the Herfindahl index of industrial ownership are high. This suggests that a small coalition of industrial companies is able to influence investment spending. In contrast, large institutional holdings reduce the positive link between investment spending and cash flow relation and, hence, suboptimal investing. Whereas there is no evidence of over- or underinvesting at low levels of insider shareholding, a high concentration of control in the hands of executive directors reduces the underinvestment problem.

This study investigates how CEO political ideology affects payout policy. Studying the CEOs of S&P 500 firms during 1997–2019 and measuring CEO political ideology by CEO political donations, we find that conservative CEOs are more likely to pay dividends and to make share repurchases, while also paying higher dividends. We find that conservative CEOs finance the higher dividends and share repurchases by utilizing the cash holdings and reducing capital and R&D expenditures. Nevertheless, CEO political ideology does not explain dividend cuts. This suggests that firms led by conservative CEOs exhibit levels of dividend flexibility comparable to those of firms led by other CEOs. Finally, we find that CEO conservatism has no effect on firm performance, firm value, R&D expenditure, and capital expenditure.