The (Ir)relevance of Disclosure of Compliance with Corporate Governance Codes - Evidence from the German Stock Market

Eric Nowak, Roland Rott and Till G. Mahr
Additional contact information
Eric Nowak: Universtity of Lugano, Institute of Finance
Roland Rott: Goethe Universtity, Department of Finance
Till G. Mahr: KPM Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft

No 06-11, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute

Abstract: This paper studies the short- and long-run announcement effects of declaring compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code (‘the Code’). We examine a unique, hand-collected data set of 317 German listed firms from 2002-2005. First, we present evidence from an analysis of firms’ compliance behaviour regarding the Code. Second, event study results suggest that firm value is unaffected by such announcements, although there was widespread assumption by the Code’s regulator and promoters that shortterm market reactions would follow first-time disclosure of the declaration of conformity. For the long term, we find that neither higher levels of Code compliance nor improvements in governance quality have a (positive) impact on stock price performance compared to low levels of compliance and a reduction in the level of compliance. Our results add further evidence to the hypothesis that self-regulatory corporate governance reform initiatives relying on mandatory disclosure without independent monitoring and legal enforcement are ineffective and do not positively influence shareholder value.

Keywords: Option pricing; Corporate Governance; Self-Regulation; Governance Index; Event Studies; Long-Run Performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G14 G34 G38 K22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2006-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=922010 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 410 Gone (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=922010 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=922010)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp0611

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ridima Mittal ().