Finance, Accounting and Corporate Governance
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Research Areas
The Center for Corporate Governance was established in April 2010 and is one of HHL’s established focal points in research and education. In its work, it also aims to achieve practical relevance.
The Center is under the direction of an academic board consisting of Prof. Dr. Marc Steffen Rapp (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Prof. Christian Strenger (Frankfurt) and Prof. Dr. Michael Wolff (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen).
The Center’s research deals with questions related to the relevance of good governance to performance, diversity and the development of corporate governance in emerging countries. Prof. Christian Strenger, co-director of the Center and member of the German Corporate Governance Commission and numerous supervisory boards, explains the CCG activities: “Apart from research and education especially in the area of corporate governance and performance, targeted events promote professional exchange between research and practice.”
The CCG cooperates with national and international entitites (including the IFC Global Corporate Governance Solutions Program). It is supported by DWS Investment GmbH and E&Y Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft.
Courses of the Center for Corporate Governance offer students an in-depth understanding of theoretical corporate governance concepts and their application in different regulatory systems, which have become an increasingly important issue of economic research as well as the public debate. In all courses of the CCG, real cases and large scale empirical research papers are the framework for discussions on various corporate governance issues, e.g. executive compensation, responsibilities and role of corporate boards, and governance codes of best practice. For HHL’s doctoral program the CCG offers a course that enhances the students’ understanding of corporate governance by becoming familiar with contemporary research methods in the field of corporate governance research.
After the corporate scandals in the nineties, several codes of good governance have been established around the world. These codes then became a central element in the public discussion of governance issues of listed companies. This project analyzes the acceptance level of the German Corporate Governance Codes among large, German listed companies.
The Code Compliance Study examines annually the acceptance level of the current version of the German Corporate Governance Code (GCGC) within DAX and MDAX firms. The study analyzes overall compliance, as well as the firms’ compliance behavior on the level of ‘Shall’-Recommendations and ‘Should’-Suggestions. In addition, the study examines the firms’ governance quality based on four specially constructed governance indices that represent the key areas of governance (transparency, monitoring/control, incentives and diversity). Moreover, compliance behavior with respect to GCGC’s suggestions as well as the relationship between firm characteristics and compliance levels is analyzed. Overall, the study presents a broad and comprehensive view on code compliance behavior of German listed firms.
In 2018, the Center for Corporate Governance hosted the “Workshop on Corporate Governance and the Capital Allocation Process Within Society” at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management. More than 40 participants from six countries spent 1 1/2 days in Leipzig to discuss problems of corporate governance and the most current research by internationally renowned researchers from the field. Ten years after the financial crisis and three years after Dieselgate, the workshop’s panel discussion brought together senior scholars and experienced practitioners and discussed the question “Do we need more or less corporate governance regulation?”.
The Center for Corporate Governance is grateful to EY and Daniela Mattheus, Partner at EY Corporate Governance Board Services, for their generous support of the workshop.