New issue of the Corporate Ownership and Control journal
The editorial team of Virtus Interpress is glad to announce the release of the new issue of the journal Corporate Ownership and Control. This international issue is represented by studies from the USA, Italy, Finland, Canada, Tunisia, Germany, the UK, and other countries of the world.
With 14 published articles, this issue focuses on investigating current trends in corporate governance and ownership including such interesting topics as ownership structure, sustainable human resource practice, voluntary disclosures, debt contracting, executive compensation, managerial power, individual auditors, modified audit opinions, audit conservatism, client quality, annual general meetings, artificial intelligence, ethical leadership, business ethics, normative ethics, responsible management, ethical decision-making, audit quality, audit fees, non-audit service fees, forecast reporting, time trend, mandatory auditor rotation, audit market concentration, transaction cost theory, and others.
In the first paper, Iwan Suhardjo and Meiliana Suparman examine sustainable human resource practices in Indonesian family-owned listed companies, revealing that while sustainability is acknowledged, the approach remains largely compliance-driven and fragmented.
Francesco Napoli’s study conducts an empirical analysis and reveals that when quoted Italian firms (family and non-family) increase the intensity of their R&D activity, they also increase voluntary disclosure of information about both R&D and strategy, but the different attitudes towards the two components of voluntary disclosure is demonstrated by the behaviour of the two types of firms.
Spencer N. Palmer examines why some chief executive officers (CEOs) participate in their firm’s convertible note offerings and the relationship between CEO participation and their firm’s lending outcomes and concludes that executive involvement can meaningfully reduce financing costs, particularly in smaller, financially constrained firms.
Shab Hundal, Christina Borén, and Anne Eskola analyze performance-based compensation across Nordic firms, demonstrating that CEO incentives tied to firm performance do improve financial outcomes, though governance structures such as board size and independence significantly moderate this relationship.
Guoping Liu and Jerry Sun study the motivations behind modified audit opinions in China, challenging the assumption that such practices stem from auditor conservatism and instead pointing to client quality as the dominant factor.
Souad Chaieb’s exploration of accounting conservatism and cash holdings in French firms finds that board independence significantly strengthens the conservative approach to liquidity management, highlighting again how governance design can amplify or dilute financial discipline.
The study by Joachim Rojahn, Sandra Sülzenbrück, and Karsten Lübke contributes to the literature by analysing the joint association of managerial overconfidence, certainty, narcissism, and the Big Five personality traits with debt ratios in the institutional setting of the German two-tier system, and provides insights into how corporate governance quality moderates the effects of personality.
Mfon Akpan compares large language models’ (LLMs’) performance on educational benchmarks and concludes that LLMs significantly outperform human benchmarks in tasks such as undergraduate knowledge and advanced reading comprehension, indicating substantial progress toward artificial general intelligence.
Billel Ferhani, in his research, offers a timely framework for integrating ethical leadership into corporate strategy, calling for a deliberate alignment between leadership styles and organizational ethics.
Julian Kordisch and Reiner Quick focus on forecast reporting quality in Germany, where audit firm characteristics, especially tenure and specialization, demonstrate subtle but important effects.
Flavio Spagnuolo’s study on circular economy orientation in mergers and acquisitions transactions finds that sustainability not only drives strategic behavior but also reduces informational frictions, resulting in more efficient due diligence processes.
Hatem Elfeituri and Jassem Alokla analyze the dual role of external governance indicators and internal mechanisms in influencing financial performance in the UK, finding that institutional quality, particularly the rule of law, is a powerful enabler of profitability.
Mario Henry Meuthen’s paper on auditor rotation behavior provides further evidence for transaction cost considerations over reputational concerns in German HDAX firms, offering a rare longitudinal perspective on how regulatory mandates play out in practice.
Nnadozie Chijioke Nnaji-Ihedinmah, Nma Okechukwu Okoroji, Okechukwu Ferdinand Cyril-Nwuche, and Juliet Anuri Onwuchekwa focus on the impact of block family, and institutional block ownership structure on the performance of listed firms in Nigeria. Their hypotheses for the study sought to establish whether block family ownership, block ownership, and institutional block ownership have any impact on the performance of the selected firms.
The full issue of the journal is available at the following link.
We hope that researchers will find the articles in this issue particularly interesting and useful for their research activities and that they will contribute to overcoming the gaps highlighted in these publications.
