Corporate Governance: An International Review Special Issue on 'Ownership and Corporate Governance across Institutional Contexts'

摘要

Ownership is the foundation of corporate governance (Zattoni, 2011), as "no firm exists without owners and the property rights allocated to these owners" (Aguilera & Crespi-Cladera, 2016: 50). In the last several decades, the ownership fabric of corporations has undergone a profound transformation (e.g., Kahle & Stulz, 2017). Individual investors, entrepreneurs and their families, the once ubiquitous owners (Rydqvist, Spizman, & Strebulaev, 2014), along with corporate investors, governmental ownership, and foundations, have been joined by a cornucopia of organizational shareholders, such as public and private pension funds, union-, mutual-, and hedge-funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). Globally, investment assets under management exceeded $80 trillion in 2016 (Kelly, 2017), fueling corporate governance and performance pressures on investment companies.