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In this study, we examine the effectiveness of corporate governance in mitigating dilution in the economic and voting interests of existing nonparticipating (retail) shareholders in private placements. Based on a sample of 2420 private placements in Australia from 2001 to 2012, we find support for this proposition through the influence of corporate governance on pricing negotiation and firms' choice of issuing method in private placements. Specifically, firms with better corporate governance offer private placements with a smaller discount, and are more likely to include a share purchase plan, which protects nonparticipating shareholders from ownership dilution in the placement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides evidence that after several decades of fighting for equal pay for equal work, an unexplained gender pay gap remains amongst senior executives in ASX-listed firms. After controlling for a large suite of personal, occupational and firm observables, we find female senior executives receive, on average, 22.58 percent less in base salary for the period 2002-2013. When executives are awarded performance-based pay, females receive on average 16.47 percent less in cash bonus and 18.21 percent less in long-term incentives than males. The results are robust to using firm fixed effects and propensity-score matching. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition results show that the mean pay gap cannot be attributed to gender differences in attributes, including job titles. Instead, the results point to differences in returns on firm-specific variables, in particular firm risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review accounting and finance research on corporate governance (CG). In the course of our review, we focus on a particularly vexing issue, namely endogeneity in the relationships between CG and other matters of concern to accounting and finance scholars, and suggest ways to deal with it. Given the advent of large commercial CG databases, we also stress the importance of how CG is measured and in particular, the construction of CG indices, which should be sensitive to local institutional arrangements, and the need to capture both internal and external aspects of governance. The 'stickiness' of CG characteristics provides an additional challenge to CG scholars. Better theory is required, for example, to explain whether various CG practices substitute for each other or are complements. While a multidisciplinary approach to developing better theory is never without its difficulties, it could enrich the current body of knowledge in CG. Despite the vastness of the existing CG literature, these issues do suggest a number of avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]