Corporate social responsibility and governance

Journal of Management and Governance -     

Business ethics,company value and ownership structure

This paper examines the effect of ethical performance on the value of a company and the attractiveness of its stocks for major owners; institutional investors and insiders. Using the Ethisphere^® Institute Ethics Quotient to distinguish between ethical and unethical companies, results show that good ethical performance enhanced company value for a sample of 240 large US companies. Furthermore, strong evidence is found that institutional investors are attracted to ethical companies, but that insiders do not show any investment preferences based on the ethical performance of a company.

     

Correction to: Corporate social responsibility and governance

Journal of Management and Governance - The original version of this article contained a mistake. The list of the authors was incorrect. The authors of this article are: Jean-Michel Sahut, Marta...     

Governance and performance of MFIs: the Cameroon case

The main challenge of microfinance institutions and social economy firms remains their survival, and to meet this challenge, MFIs need to be competitive. The poor performance of MFIs is usually attributed to their decision-making and operational processes. The governance of MFIs is therefore identified as one of their main risks. Despite this, governance is still little explored in these organizations and empirical studies find a weak relationship between classical governance mechanisms and MFI performance, especially for the MFIs situated in Africa (Thrikawala et al. in Asian J Financ Account 5(1):160–182, 2013a). In this study, we examine whether the effect of governance mechanisms on the performance of MFIs differs according to their legal status in the Cameroonian context. On the one hand, our empirical results show that there is a significant relationship between some specific governance mechanisms and MFIs’ performance. On the other hand, adjusting the governance mechanisms according to the MFIs’ legal status improves their efficiency. The analysis of the impact of the governance mechanisms on the performance of MFIs requires not only an approach that is specific to this sector but also an approach that is adapted to their legal status. Moreover, from a managerial point of view, it would be desirable to adjust the governance mechanisms, depending on the legal status of the MFIs, to make them more efficient from the social as well as the financial standpoint.