EDITORIAL: A diversified outlook at the theory and practices of corporate governance

Souad Chaieb highlighted the cultural impact on the degree of compliance with International Financial Reporting Standards in 55 developing countries for the year 2014 in order to identify IFRS Standards. Results show that culture does not promote the degree of compliance with IFRS. However, only one significant relationship was found between individualism and the degree of compliance with IFRS Standards.

Nidhi Sharma Sahore and Anshul Verma aimed to understand whether firm characteristics explain the extent of corporate disclosures in the annual reports of listed Indian companies. The disclosure scores of Indian CNX 100 companies over a period of five years (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) related to firm characteristics such as age, size, and listing status were arrived at through content analysis and subsequent coding of the data. The study found firm characteristics such as age and listing status to be non-significant in leading corporations to enhanced disclosures. This is perfectly in line with the literature by Modiba  Mohamed A. K. Basuony investigated the relationship between firm characteristics, board structure, and ownership structure with CSR information dissemination via social media. The results indicate that the company that has a high number of females on board has a significant effect on CSR and the product and service as a component of CSR. Also, the paper studies the effect of board structure and other control variables on the online CSR for the top listed UK firms. The results show that online CSR disclosure through the firms' websites has been affected by board size, board diversity, audit type, profitability, leverage, firm age, and the sector in which the firm operates. These results add more value to the research in the field by Gokarna and Krishnamoorthy (2021), Al Fadli (2020), Salvioni, Franzoni, and Gennari (2016), Basuony, Elseidi, and Mohamed (2014).
Gimede Gigante and Maria Vittoria Venezia considered an issue of shareholder activism in Italy, understanding the major current regulations, the biggest players involved, the target companies, the most frequently required objectives, and the overall success rate of such requests compared to other European countries' neighbours. An analysis of the differences in terms of legal framework and minorities protection is provided as part of this paper, to give the reader the theoretical underpinnings for the subsequent analysis.
Marvin Jagals, Erik Karger, and Frederik Ahlemann explored the past to understand the present and shape the future of data governance. The authors gave an overview of how the research field changed from 2005 to 2020, commenting on its development and pointing out future research paths based on our findings. They conducted a bibliometric analysis to describe the research field's bibliometric and intellectual structure. The findings show that for years the research field concentrated on a few topics, which currently undergoes change and has led to an opening up of the research field.
An interesting topic additional to corporate governance in this issue of the journal is public sector governance, looking at aged care (Jean Claude Mutiganda) and education (Assia Liberatore).
Jean Claude Mutiganda investigated the ways in which dissensus has influenced governmentality during a longitudinal process of competitive tendering of public services. Data are from a field study conducted in the field of public care for the elderly from 2007 to 2015 in Finland.
Assia Liberatore contributed to the existing research with a deep assessment of Italian school governance. The original contribution here is linking school governance to the learning outcomes of high school students and aspects of their daily life activities using a macroeconomic perspective. The author reviewed the various reforms of school governance in order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each reform. Also, the author involved a quantitative research methodology to analyze how school governance reflects social culture, students' well-being and educational outcomes. The paper by Valentina Lagasio is focused on Italy, where distinctive features of corporate governance can be identified due to the peculiar legal and industrial framework in which Italian companies operate. The contribution of the paper is to further shed light on the historical background of the Italian industrial sector that made the Italian industrial system slightly different from the other countries and to give a comprehensive, but synthetic, view of the corporate governance of Italian listed companies. This is a solid contribution to the previous research by Celentano, Lepore, Pisano, D'Amore, and Alvino (2020), Caserio  The authors analyzed the relation between unconditional conservatism and accrual-based earnings management and the relation between unconditional conservatism and real earnings management, focusing on the role of the institutional shareholders variable in these two relations. The authors find evidence of positive (negative) relations between unconditional conservatism and accrual-based (real) earnings management. Also, they demonstrate that the presence of institutional shareholders has a mitigating (amplifying) impact on the relation between unconditional conservatism and accrual-based (real) earnings management.
Valentin Peter, Britta Hachenberg, and Dirk Schiereck analyzed the determinants for successful bond restructurings under the German Bond Act. The law regulates bond restructuring in Germany and contains collective action clauses that intend to make the amendment of bond terms easy compared to the U.S. where these clauses are not common. The authors found that bond restructuring is relatively convenient under the German Bond Act, as the majority of restructuring attempts are successful. The authors focused on how bond holdings of retail investors impact bond restructuring and found that participation rates, the probability to constitute quorums in bondholder meetings, and most importantly, the probability to successfully amend bond terms, are negatively related to the degree of bond holdings of retail investors.
Alberto Tron and Federico Colantoni investigated if the use of several types (currency, interest rate, and commodity) of financial derivatives can affect the value of a company. Findings show that the use of derivatives does not affect the firm value in the Italian market. Results confirm the role of corporate governance mechanisms on the relationship between firm value and the use of derivatives and that their impact is country-specific. Previous research by Firmansyah, Utami, Umar, and Mulyani (2020), Till (2015), Pezzuto (2014) are in the line with this paper.
Akshay Damani and Nandip Vaidya attempted to compare and correlate global actively managed equity mutual funds' performance across time intervals, to evaluate and establish how predicting future performance can be made meaningful for investors using analysis of historical data (March 2009-March 2021). Of the top 500 global equity mutual funds based on market-cap (on March 31, 2021), the paper evaluated 180 actively managed funds adding up to approximately USD 5 trillion of the fund assets as of March 31, 2021. It was found that the market timing abilities of fund managers were unstable across periods and could not be used for predicting performance.