Publikationen

Unsere Forschungergebnisse unterstützen die gesellschaftliche Debatte rund um aktuelle finanzökonomische Fragestellungen. Durch die Veröffentlichung der Arbeiten in internationalen Fachzeitschriften und unserer Working Paper Series sollen diese für einen möglichst breiten Adressatenkreis zugänglich werden.

HFRC Working Paper Series

Unsere Arbeitspapiere fassen die neuesten Ergebnisse aus der Forschungsarbeit des Instituts zusammen. Die Papiere stellen Diskussionsbeiträge dar und sollen zur kritischen Kommentierung der Ergebnisse anregen.

Alle Working Papers

Board of Directors

Board ancestral diversity and voluntary greenhouse gas emission disclosure

Johannes Barg, Wolfgang Drobetz, Sadok El Ghoul, Omrane Guedhami, Henning Schröder
British Journal of Management | 08/2023 | Forthcoming
This paper examines the relationship between board diversity and firms’ decisions to voluntarily disclose information about their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We focus on board ancestral diversity as a relatively new dimension of (deep-level) board structure and document that it has a positive and statistically significant effect on a firm’s scope and quality of voluntary GHG emission disclosure. The effect goes beyond the impact of more common (surface-level) dimensions of board diversity and remains robust after addressing endogeneity concerns. In line with the theoretical conjecture that diversity enhances a board’s advising and monitoring capacity, we find that the impact of diverse boards is stronger in more complex firms and in firms with low levels of institutional ownership. Overall, our findings provide evidence for board diversity being a relevant governance factor in corporate environmental decision making.

An integrated framework of corporate governance and firm valuation

Stefan Beiner, Wolfgang Drobetz, Markus Schmid, Heinz Zimmermann
European Financial Management | 02/2006
Recent empirical research shows evidence of a positive relationship between the quality of firm‐specific corporate governance and firm valuation. Instead of looking at one single corporate governance mechanism in isolation, we construct a broad corporate governance index and apply five additional variables related to ownership structure, board characteristics, and leverage to provide a comprehensive description of firm‐level corporate governance for a representative sample of Swiss firms. To control for potential endogeneity of these six governance mechanisms, we develop a system of simultaneous equations and apply three‐stage least squares (3SLS). Our results support the widespread hypothesis of a positive relationship between corporate governance and firm valuation.