The 2003 Italian Corporate Law Reform, establishing one-tier vs. two-tier board for listed and unlisted joint stock companies, introduced alternative corporate governance systems. This study implements probit regressions in order to compare 548 unlisted firms: corporations with best performances...

The literature on corporate governance has investigated the relationship between the adoption of a corporate governance system and firms’ performance, but it seems to ignore the issue of costs of the body corporate members among different systems, i.e. the traditional and alternative models,...

This paper is devoted to the increasingly relevant issue of corruption. Financial and economic literature has progressively focused its attention on the impact of corruption on the financial performances of listed companies, highlighting the existence of a negative relation between a Corruption...

This study analyzes a sample of cooperative banks in Italy and Germany, using panel data from 2006-2009. The empirical analysis shows that there are significant differences in stability and performance between the two countries considered. In particular, the findings show that Italian...

Over the past two decades in the Chinese banking system substantial progress has been made, and reforms have been mainly aimed at improving its governance and efficiency, but many governance problems still exist and hinder a complete transition to a market economy. Through the analysis of the...

Purpose – Alternative corporate governance systems (CGSs) have attracted a significant bulk of research recently. While the connection between the adoption of an alternative system (one tier board or two tier board system) and firms’ performances has not been fully analysed yet, the purpose...

This article addresses the impact of productivity, corruption, and trade openness on the stock returns of 265 industrial companies listed in eight Eastern European fast-emerging markets, over the 2004–2013 period. Through a three-factor model that includes both measures at firm level and...

The target of our research is focused on the measurement of the impact of a Country Governance Index and of a Corporate Productivity Index on the total annual investment returns of stocks of a large sample of European Industrial Companies from January 1, 1996 to December 31, 2008. The authors...

The purpose of this work is the study of the personal characteristics of mothers who requested the child-care benefits of the project called “Fiocchi in Ospedale” in the days immediately following childbirth. The work is based on the results of a survey led at Niguarda Hospital in Milan...

In this paper we stress the limits of the current debt sustainability framework used in the IMF-WB HIPC Initiative and the necessity to include domestic public debt into the analysis. The standard sustainability analysis does not take into account the fully-fledged budget constraint and the...