Suchergebnisse

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance (MCCG, 2007 and 2012) on the performance of the listed companies in Malaysia. The agency theory and resource dependency theories indicate that the firms with strong corporate governance outperform firms with weaker governance. This paper explores this relationship in a developing country like Malaysia having different institutional environment compared to western countries.


Design/methodology/approach
The study used a sample of 113 listed companies in Malaysia. The study incorporates the endogenous relationship between corporate governance, firm performance and leverage.


Findings
The study analyzes how the corporate governance framework affected firm performance in Malaysia with the help of self-developed corporate governance index (MCGI). The authors' findings show that the performance of the firm is positively and significantly related with corporate governance measured by MCGI. Secondly, corporate governance of sample firms shows marked improvements after implementation of MCCG 2012 as compared to MCCG 2007.


Originality/value
The findings of this paper support the agency and the resource dependency theories. The study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between the corporate governance and firm performance in emerging economy and builds a case for enforcement of strong corporate governance code by government agencies.

We exploit a natural experiment in Massachusetts in 2012 to estimate the causal effect of lowering voter registration costs on: voter registration, turnout and voting behavior in presidential elections. Both a within Massachusetts specification and a cross-state specification (utilizing Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire data) find a statistically significant effect on voter registration and turnout that is of a material magnitude. However, conditional on registration we find no material difference in turnout. Finally, we find a large treatment effect on Democrat voteshare. Our results highlight the importance of voter registration costs for electoral participation, especially for citizens from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.