Marc van Essen

Assessing Managerial Power Theory A Meta-Analytic Approach to Understanding the Determinants of CEO Compensation

Although studies about the determinants of CEO compensation are ubiquitous, the balance of evidence for one of the more controversial theoretical approaches, managerial power theory, remains inconclusive. The authors provide a meta-analysis of 219 U.S.-based studies, focusing on the relationships between indicators of managerial power and levels of CEO compensation and CEO pay-performance sensitivities. The results indicate that managerial power theory is well equipped for predicting core compensation variables such as total cash and total compensation but less so for predicting the sensitivity of pay to performance. In most situations where CEOs are expected to have power over the pay setting process, they receive significantly higher levels of total cash and total compensation. In contrast, where boards are expected to have more power, CEOs receive lower total cash and total compensation. In addition, powerful directors also appear to be able to establish tighter links between CEO compensation and firm performance and can accomplish this even in the face of powerful CEOs. The authors discuss the implications for theory and research regarding the determinants of executive compensation.

What Do We Know About Private Family Firms? A Meta‐Analytical Review

The universe of family firms is heterogeneous, and findings gleaned from publicly listed firms may not apply to the ubiquitous, but less frequently studied, privately held family firm (PFF). As PFFs are insulated from capital market pressures, owner–managers have greater latitude in setting strategic goals, which may result in different strategic choices and performance outcomes. By employing meta–analytical techniques on 48 studies conducted in nine countries, we synthesize prior PFF research. We show that PFFs prefer more conservative strategies, but contrary to received wisdom, this risk aversion does not hurt their performance. We conclude with an agenda for future research.

How Does Family Control Influence Firm Strategy and Performance? A Meta‐Analysis of US Publicly Listed Firms

Manuscript Type. Empirical. Research Question/Issue. A contentious and prominent research question in the management literature is whether publicly listed family firms (FFs) outperform other types of corporations. Through a research synthesis of all available studies on the performance of US FFs, we address this question directly. We also extend the debate by raising three salient follow‐up questions. First, is the performance differential between FFs and non‐FFs attributable to a unique set of strategic choices? Second, do FF performance effects persist across generational transitions in FF control? Third, are performance differentials across generations attributable to intergenerational shifts in corporate governance and strategy?Research Findings/Insights. With respect to our primary research question, we find that the balance of evidence indicates that (US) FFs outperform other types of public corporations. We also evaluate competing narratives regarding which strategies are characteristic of FFs, and demonstrate that their diversification, internationalization, and financing strategies mediate the FF‐performance relationship in manners consistent with the narratives advanced by certain leading FF scholars, but not others. Further, we find that the performance of (US) FFs drops dramatically after the first generation and show that this negative performance differential is due to the much more conservative patterns of strategic decision making enacted by successor generations. Theoretical/Academic Implications. In addition to providing the most comprehensive evidence to date regarding the performance attributes of FFs, we nuance several theoretical debates concerning the propensity of FFs to diversify, internationalize, and leverage their equity capital. Practitioner/Policy Implications. We identify value‐creating strategic choices of FFs related to internationalization, diversification, and capital structure. We also identify strategic choices often made in successor‐led FFs which reduce value. Both sets of findings are relevant to FF executives and consultants. The policy implications of the study are that in advanced liberal market economies high‐quality capital market institutions are likely to contribute to FF outperformance vis‐a‐vis other types of publicly listed firms, but these findings may not hold in other types of national governance systems or in emerging markets.

Home Country Institutions and the Internationalization-Performance Relationship A Meta-Analytic Review

We propose that the mixed findings of research on the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship reflect its failure to adequately consider the moderating role of firms’ home country formal and informal institutions. This general hypothesis is supported in a meta-analysis of the firm-, industry-, home country–, and host country–level factors driving the I-P relationship across 32 countries between 1972 and 2012 from 359 primary studies—the largest sample of primary studies of any meta-analysis on this topic to date. We make three main contributions to the I-P and global strategy literatures. First, we develop a novel integration of the theoretical logics from the I-P research and the institution-based view of strategy to explain how embeddedness in home country institutions affects the strength of the I-P relationship. Second, we show the importance of including both formal and informal institutions in analyses of firms’ institutional embeddedness, thereby extending our knowledge of the effects of institutional complexity. Our third contribution is methodological and reflects our use of advanced meta-analytical techniques based on both product-moment and partial correlations as effect sizes, which allow us to address unresolved debates about the sign and shape of the I-P relationship. Our results show that the I-P relationship is positive, although the overall effect is small and varies greatly across firms’ home countries. We conclude by discussing the findings’ relevance and promising future research avenues, including novel research questions, multilevel theoretical and empirical frameworks, and improvements in methodological rigor.

Competition and Cooperation in Corporate Governance: The Effects of Labor Institutions on Blockholder Effectiveness in 23 European Countries

We provide an analysis of the costs and benefits of blockholding in Europe, where it is a dominant, but certainly not universal, corporate governance strategy for shareholders of publicly listed firms. We find that the effectiveness of blockholding is conditioned by the specific labor institutions that distinguish European countries from the rest of the world, and that these institutional effects involve both competition and cooperation between blockholders and collective labor interests. We also find that relational blockholders are better able to cope with, or benefit from, these institutional effects than arms-length blockholders. Empirically, we use advanced meta-analytic methods on a total sample of 748,569 firm-year observations, derived from 162 studies covering 23 European countries.

Why Is Family Firms' Internationalization Unique? A Meta‐Analysis

Despite its importance, there is no clear understanding of the uniqueness of family firms’ internationalization. This article sheds new light on this issue with a meta–analysis of 76 studies covering 41 countries. We show that the considerable study and cross–country differences in the relationship between family firm and internationalization are explained by the roles of family control, internationalization types, and home countries’ institutional contexts (i.e., minority shareholders protection and generalized trust of people from other countries). Therefore, we examine the existing divergent results using theories that reconcile some of these mixed findings and shed light on family firms’ specific internationalization challenges.

Expressive Shareholder Democracy: A Multilevel Study of Shareholder Dissent in 15 Western European Countries

This study develops an expressive understanding of shareholder dissent. In this view, shareholder dissent is not only about the voting outcomes of proposals put to the vote, but also expresses an evaluation of the firms corporate governance set-up. We hypothesize that shareholder dissent expresses an agency theoretical evaluation of corporate governance, but that the degree to which the capitalist system of a country is a coordinated market economy (CME) leads shareholders to evaluate corporate governance more in team production terms. We test our theoretical model using multilevel techniques on a sample of 12,513 proposals voted on in 717 firms listed in 15 Western European countries and find support for our predictions. Our study not only contributes to a better understanding of the corporate governance role of shareholder dissent, but also shows that what shareholders express through dissent differs across national contexts.

Reputational Penalties in Financial Markets: An Ethical Mechanism?

Responsible investment (RI) and responsible corporate behaviour received a lot of attention during the last decade in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature (McWilliams and Siegel 2001, 2006). After the U.S. and European financial markets were being troubled in the early 2000s by several major scandals like Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and Parmalat, financial ethics received a lot of attention by the public as well. Irresponsible corporate behaviour can occur in different ways such as corruption, market abuse, fraud, insider trading, ecological harm, racial or sexual discrimination. Examples include foreign briberies to get supply contracts (Volkswagen), insider trading ahead of a profit warning (EADS), lower salaries for female employees (Wal-Mart), and worker’s conditions in Indonesia (Nike).

Proxy advisors and shareholder dissent: A Cross-country comparative study

Proxy advisors are information intermediaries that enable shareholders to exercise their voting rights. While proxy advisors’ influence is documented in market-based corporate governance systems, we know little about the corporate governance role of proxy advice in relationship-based governance systems. Drawing on agency theory and the comparative corporate governance literature, we theorize that shareholders are sensitive to the costs and benefits of monitoring by considering internal monitoring capabilities. We also theorize that relative to market-based corporate governance systems, proxy advice is both less influential and has lower predictive quality in relationship-based governance systems. We test our multilevel model using 13,497 voting results from 613 firms in 16 Western European countries and generally find support for our predictions.

Agency Theory and Corporate Governance in China: A Meta-Analysis

How has the impact of ‘good corporate governance’ principles on firm performance changed over time in China? Amassing a database of 84 studies, 684 effect sizes, and 547,622 firm observations, we explore this important question by conducting a meta‐analysis on the corporate governance literature on China. The weight of evidence demonstrates that two major ‘good corporate governance’ principles advocating board independence and managerial incentives are indeed associated with better firm performance. However, we cannot find strong support for the criticisms against CEO duality. In addition, we go beyond a static perspective (such as certain governance mechanisms are effective or ineffective) by investigating the temporal hypotheses. We reveal that over time, with the improvement in the quality of market institutions and development of financial markets, the monitoring mechanisms of the board and state ownership become more strongly related to firm performance, whereas the incentive mechanisms lose their significance. Overall, our findings advance a dynamic institution‐based view by substantiating the case that institutional transitions matter for the relationship between governance mechanisms and firm performance in the second largest economy in the world.