The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority suggests that as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused significant disruption to the economy, businesses, and people’s lives, national supervisory authorities should mitigate the pandemic’s impact on the European insurance sector. The functioning of insurance companies is in danger as they must balance a drastic increase in the number of claims with their capital and solvency stability. In this study, we evaluate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on insurance companies using European insurance companies’ financial statement data from 2010 to 2020. The results unambiguously demonstrate that the pandemic has negatively affected the functioning of the insurance sector. In particular, the return on assets decreased in German and Italian insurance companies during the pandemic. Furthermore, the solvency ratio decreased in the Belgian, French, and German insurance sectors. Conversely, the Polish insurance sector was unaffected. Moreover, we did not find any effects on the Z-score ratio in our sample. Lastly, the value of receivables owed to Belgian insurance companies increased. Based on this evidence, we argue that European legislators should discuss how to manage the probable financial problems of insurance companies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study examines the effect of the presence of foreign experts on a company’s board on the important characteristic of high-quality financial reporting: timeliness. We focus on experts with foreign experience (EFEs) who are board members, in the context of a dual board model. The sample is drawn from the population of Polish nonfinancial firms listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange during 2010–2015. For analysis, we use the generalised method of moments with fixed effects. After controlling for corporate governance and firm characteristics, we find that the presence of EFEs shortens the time necessary to deliver financial reports. Our findings enrich the knowledge on the monitoring role of EFEs in corporate governance, especially in the context of the insider model of corporate governance and a dual board structure. The findings have significant implications for policy formulation and provide evidence that the presence of EFEs on supervisory boards may lead to increased timeliness of financial reporting, thus increasing financial reporting quality.

The corporate governance reform promulgated in 2015 in Japan has contributed to a substantial increase of board independence and a reduction of average board tenure. Our empirical analysis covering 3405 public companies demonstrates that reinvigorated corporate oversight and an increasing post-reform shift towards prioritization of shareholder value have led to a persistent increase of corporate profitability, asset productivity, dividend payouts, acquisitions’ value, and valuation multiples. We also document a significant increase of sensitivity of executives’ and directors’ compensations to the dynamics of firms’ bottom lines. The positive changes are the most pronounced within companies where independent directors constitute a majority on the board. The most notable drawbacks of the reform are a significant reduction in net employment creation and in employee turnover within the largest companies. These might be a possible reason for the documented improvement in corporate performance. The number of part-time employees has also seen a significant increase. While being prima facie focused on reinvigorating the private sector, the corporate governance reform may implicitly undermine the established social contract based on job security. Therefore, our study is important from the perspective of sustainable development of the corporate sector as it demonstrates that while concentrating on improving corporate governance, it is also necessary to consider the business’ social responsibility.

We evaluated the effects of the bank levy (BL) on the profitability of commercial banks and the balance sheet reconstruction, and the shifting of banks’ activities into countries with lower BL rates after BL introduction. Moreover, we investigated the effects of the Basel III and Single Resolution Fund (SRF) introduction on the amount of BL payment. We compared two different BL designs: the Hungarian and the German versions. The results clearly pointed to the negative effect of BL introduction on the ROA of larger Hungarian commercial banks and of smaller commercial banks in Germany. Moreover, the results showed that the introduction of the BL did not influence loan activity in Hungary. However, it decreased the value of the loans from German commercial banks. The results showed that commercial banks in Hungary prefer to restructure their balance or shift assets among different locations or entities to decrease the bank levy. The research findings also showed that Hungarian commercial banks decreased the value of paid BL after the Basel III introduction. On the other hand, the results also showed that the value of paid BL in German commercial banks increased after the Basel III and SRF introduction, especially in larger banks.