Regulation and comparative corporate governance

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.