Emerging markets like India have poorly functioning institutions, leading to severe agency and information problems. Business groups in these markets have the potential both to offer benefits to member firms, and to destroy value. We analyze the performance of affiliates of diversified Indian business groups relative to unaffiliated firms. We find that accounting and stock market measures of firm performance initially decline with group diversification and subsequently increase once group diversification exceeds a certain level. Unlike U.S. conglomerates' lines of business, and similar to the affiliates of U.S. LBO associations, affiliates of the most diversified business groups outperform unaffiliated firms.

Some scholars have argued that globalization should pressure firms to adopt a common set of the most efficient corporate governance practices, while others maintain that such convergence will not occur because of a variety of forms of path-dependence. With new data on governance in 24 developing countries as well as data on laws protecting shareholders and creditors in 49 developed and developing countries, we search for evidence that globalization is correlated with similarity in corporate governance. We find robust evidence of de jure similarity in governance. Interestingly, this is not driven by convergence to U.S. standards. Rather pairs of economically interdependent countries - especially if the countries are both economically developed - appear to adopt common corporate governance standards, even after accounting for the effects of common legal origin. In contrast to the de jure results, we find virtually no evidence of de facto similarity in corporate governance in a battery of estimations at the country, industry and firm levels. This is consistent with either the proposition that complementarities result in different national systems appropriately having different corporate governance systems, or the proposition that globalization is not strong enough to overcome local vested interests. We conclude that globalization may have induced the adoption of some common corporate governance standards but that there is little evidence that these standards have been implemented.

Some scholars have argued that globalization should pressure firms to adopt a common set of the most efficient corporate governance practices, while others maintain that such convergence will not occur because of a variety of forms of path-dependence. With new data on governance in 24 developing countries as well as data on laws protecting shareholders and creditors in 49 developed and developing countries, we search for evidence that globalization is correlated with similarity in corporate governance. We find robust evidence of de jure similarity in governance. Interestingly, this is not driven by convergence to U.S. standards. Rather pairs of economically interdependent countries - especially if the countries are both economically developed - appear to adopt common corporate governance standards, even after accounting for the effects of common legal origin. In contrast to the de jure results, we find virtually no evidence of de facto similarity in corporate governance in a battery of estimations at the country, industry and firm levels. This is consistent with either the proposition that complementarities result in different national systems appropriately having different corporate governance systems, or the proposition that globalization is not strong enough to overcome local vested interests. We conclude that globalization may have induced the adoption of some common corporate governance standards but that there is little evidence that these standards have been implemented.

Diversified business groups, consisting of legally independent firms operating across diverse industries, are ubiquitous in emerging markets. Groups around the world share certain attributes but also vary substantially in structure, ownership, and other dimensions. This paper proposes a business group taxonomy, which is used to formulate hypotheses and present evidence about the reasons for the formation, prevalence, and evolution of groups in different environments. In interpreting the evidence, the authors pay particular attention to two aspects neglected in much of the literature: the circumstances under which groups emerge and the historical evidence on some of the questions addressed by recent studies. They argue that business groups are responses to different economic conditions and that, from a welfare standpoint, they can sometimes be “paragons” and, at other times, “parasites.” The authors conclude with an agenda for future research.

Stock price synchronicity has been attributed to poor corporate governance and a lack of firm-level transparency. This paper investigates the association between different kinds of firm interlocks, control groups, and synchronicity in Chile. A unique data set containing equity cross-holdings, common individual owners, and director interlocks is used to map out firm ties and control groups. While there is a correlation between synchronicity and share ownership and equity ties, synchronicity is more strongly correlated with interlocking directorates. The presence of share directors is associated with either reduced firm-level transparency or increased correlation in firm fundamentals—due, for example, to joint resource allocation across the firms.

We analyze the disclosure practices of companies as a function of their interaction with U.S. markets for a group of 794 firms from 24 countries in the Asia‐Pacific and Europe. Our analysis uses the Transparency and Disclosure scores developed recently by Standard & Poor's. These scores rate the disclosure of companies from around the world using U.S. disclosure practices as an implicit benchmark. Results show a positive association between these disclosure scores and a variety of market interaction measures, including U.S. listing, U.S. investment flows, exports to, and operations in the United States. Trade with the United States at the country level, however, has an insignificant relationship with the disclosure scores. Our empirical analysis controls for the previously documented association between disclosure and firm size, performance, and country legal origin. Our results are broadly consistent with the hypothesis that cross‐border economic interactions are associated with similarities in disclosure and governance practices.

This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from office—affects employee attitudes and performance. Workers who spent around two days in the office each week on average self-reported greater work-life balance, more job satisfaction, and lower isolation from colleagues compared to workers who spent more or fewer days in the office. Employees in the intermediate hybrid condition received no different performance ratings compared to peers who spent more or fewer days in the office.