We study a combinatorial variant of the classical principal-agent model. In our setting a principal wishes to incentivize a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort on his behalf. Agentsʼ actions are hidden and the principal observes only the outcome of the team, which depends...

This study investigates whether family businesses (FBs) differ from non-family businesses (NFBs) regarding the institutionalisation of management accounting. Furthermore, it analyses whether FB-specific contextual factors such as the existence of non-family management and the level of family...

Twenty years ago, in my third thesis (Degos, 1991), I mentioned the problem of the formation of the opinion of the statutory auditor, and I used the catastrophe theory of René Thom. I persisted in this way with a working paper (1995) and a book [Degos, (1996), pp.171-183]. I regret not being...

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of corporate finance theories in order to outline already established and future trajectories. Compared with the earliest theories developed in the field (which mainly focused on the capital structure irrelevance), specialist literature has been...

The management literature provides four different approaches to explain the relationships between groups inside a company: Shareholder Theory, Stakeholder Theory, Agency Theory, Corporate Governance. This paper firstly discusses the theories and subsequently focuses on corporate governance...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of firms' cash holdings and ownership concentration on the firms' valuation using an unbalanced panel dataset of non-financial listed firms in Australia. Design/methodology/approach – The author used a generalized method of...

We employ agency theory to argue that the effects of family (and founder) ownership versus management will be quite different: the former is expected to contribute positively to performance, the latter is argued to erode performance. Previous studies, due to problems of multicollinearity have...

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal-agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. Using data for China we examine their incidence and test propositions from...

Purpose -With boards of directors playing both monitoring and guidance roles, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of board structure on firm value in large US and UK firms using the lenses of agency and resource dependence theories. Design/methodology/approach -Using a sample of...