The purpose of the paper is to investigate, first, the association between multiple directorship assignments (busyness) undertaken by corporate directors and firm performance, second, whether endogenously determined limits of multiple directorships, highlighting the ownership structure and other institutional settings, explain the above association better than those by exogenously mandated by regulators and third, the association between the nature of busyness and firm performance. The study develops measures of busyness in the light of the agency and resource dependence theories. The spline regression technique is applied in order to reflect institutional settings of a large sample and sub-samples of firms classified as local private, foreign and government firms in India. For local private firms, the association between the number of directorships and firm performance becomes negative before reaching the maximum number of directorships set by legislation, whereas, for foreign and government firms, the same continues to remain positive throughout. Endogenously determined cut-off points of busyness reflect institutional settings of firms, which may remain masked otherwise. The findings of the current paper can be useful to study the same phenomenon in other emerging markets having corporate governance, and ownership structures similar to that of India. The effect of busyness can be different on different firms; however, exogenously fixed regulatory limits do not reflect their institutional settings. The current paper is an attempt to fill in this research gap.

Financial Technology (FinTech, hereafter) has integrated with the banking sector. Despite its fast growth, FinTech is a relatively new and under-explored phenomenon in the academic and corporate spheres. The current study aims to explore, first, the role and relevance of FinTech in the commercial banking sector in Finland; and second, the changing dynamics of stakeholders of the banking industry in the light of FinTech. The above objectives have been studied in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary data has been collected through semi-structured interviews. A significant impact of FinTech has been observed in the following aspects of the banking sector: customers, strategy, risk management, investors, operations, competitiveness, and future growth. FinTech adoption has been contributed by the growth in the IT sector and innovations in the field of firm financing including crowdsourcing and peer-to-peer financing. Changing customers’ demands and behaviour have also facilitated FinTech adoption (Lee & Teo, 2015). Banks have been integrating FinTech into insurance services and this feature has become more profound ever since banks increased their cooperation with international insurance companies (Paschen, Wilson, & Ferreira, 2020). Similarly, there has been a significant increase in collaboration between banks and FinTech start-ups. Nonetheless, the unpredictable factors, such as the ongoing COVID-19, can influence the future innovation and adoption of FinTech.

This international online conference ― Corporate Governance: A Search for Emerging Trends in the Pandemic Times held by the team and international scholarly network of Virtus Global Center for Corporate Governance is an excellent platform to present, discuss and share the most recent ideas in the corporate governance research. This conference is the third scholarly online forum held by the team of Virtus GCCR since May 2020. There are more than 20 accepted presentations from scholars from various countries of the world. Such sort of joint efforts of scholars is a bridge to the new horizons in corporate governance research, especially in the time of the pandemic

Firms’ financing, boards of directors’ characteristics, investments, and firm-performance (financial and non-financial) occupy a pivotal place in corporate finance and corporate governance literature. The current study explores if causalities between the abovementioned four distinct albeit inter-related phenomena follow any pattern. The data comprising of 1240 firm-years belonging to Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark for the period of 2003 to 2018 have been analyzed by applying multivariate linear regression and principal component analysis. The findings show that the impact of boards of directors’ characteristics is stronger on capital structure, however, weaker on investments and financial performance. The major contribution of the article is creating a set orderly and sequential causalities between financing, boards of directors’ characteristics, investments, and firm-performance.

The current paper aims to analyze the effects of corporate boards of directors’ characteristics, executive remuneration, and several corporate governance characteristics of the manufacturing firms in three Nordic nations (Finland, Sweden, and Denmark) on the quality of financial information, measured by total discretionary accruals (measured by both balance sheet, and cash flow method). The extant literature underpins that boards of directors’ characteristics, executive remuneration, and corporate governance characteristics do affect the quality of financial reporting. Nonetheless, there is a paucity of studies that theorize and explore linkages amongst the above-mentioned determinants to explore their effects on financial reporting quality. The current study uses discretionary accruals as the proxy of financial reporting quality. A higher (lower) level of total discretionary accruals implies a lower (higher) quality of financial reporting. The analysis has been performed based on firm-level unbalanced pooled secondary data of 88 publicly listed firms (698 firm-years) in the manufacturing sector in Finland, Sweden, and Denmark for the period 2013–2020. The results indicate that the ratio of performance remuneration to fixed remuneration of chief executive officers (CEOs) as well as that of executive board members, the experience of board members, and the number of directorship positions that are held by a firm’s board members in other firms (the phenomenon of multiple directorships) adversely affect the quality of financial data. However, the level of education of the board members, board size, and firm size favorably affects the financial reporting quality.