The study examines whether greater gender diversity on the board of directors and within management is associated with greater adoption of corporate governance practices and whether this relationship intensifies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic constituted an exogenous shock that placed corporate management and governance under strain, providing a context for examining this relationship from a corporate resilience perspective. The analysis is grounded in agency theory, stakeholder theory and resource dependence theory. Using 1,316 reports on corporate governance practices and social responsibility from Chilean listed companies for 2015–2021, the study compares the Pre-pandemic period (2015–2019) and the Pandemic period (2020–2021) through a descriptive and correlational approach and multiple linear regressions. During the Pandemic period, gender diversity rates within corporate governance bodies increased, particularly on the boards of directors of companies with greater stock market presence, while progress in the adoption of governance practices varied across dimensions. In general, board gender diversity is positively and significantly associated with the adoption of corporate governance practices, particularly in the overall standard, board functioning and shareholder protection, with stronger associations observed during the pandemic for all three measures. These associations should be interpreted with caution and do not imply causality. Overall, the findings are consistent with mechanisms involving stronger oversight, greater legitimacy among stakeholders, and broader access to strategic resources, and provide evidence from Chile on the relationship between gender diversity and the adoption of corporate governance practices, with potential relevance to other emerging economies with comparable institutional characteristics under conditions of heightened uncertainty.
Drawing on legitimacy theory and public value theory, this paper examines how efficiency influences Spanish water companies’ disclosure of good-governance-related information. To address this objective, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining interviews with managers and content analysis of multiple reporting channels for a sample of 113 Spanish water companies. The results show that more efficient water companies disclose more governance information, although such disclosure remains incomplete. They devote more attention to financial and business model information, while disclosing comparatively less on politically sensitive dimensions such as corruption, taxation, and corporate governance. Theoretically, these findings suggest that Spanish water companies primarily use governance disclosure as a legitimisation strategy to protect their reputation, rather than as an expression of their commitment to public value creation and good governance. These findings have practical implications for a broad range of stakeholders, including policymakers, regulators, company managers and political actors. If efficient companies are genuinely committed to public value creation and good governance, they should provide comprehensive governance information regardless of whether such disclosure strengthens their legitimacy. This paper contributes to an under-researched area of the literature by examining efficiency as a potential driver of governance disclosure. While most prior empirical research has examined how transparency and good governance influence efficiency and performance, far less attention has focused on how efficiency may enhance transparency and good governance in municipal public services.
This study examines how political uncertainty (PU), captured through firm-level political risk (PRISK) and country-level economic policy uncertainty (EPU), shapes corporate payout policy, and whether it moderates firms’ propensity to translate cash flow into shareholder distributions. Using a sample of 7,268 firm-year observations from 1,524 US-listed firms over 2012–2021, we estimate our models using Feasible Generalized Least Squares, and identify the underlying mechanism through a triple interaction between cash flow, PU, and financial constraints. PU is negatively associated with payout and significantly dampens the sensitivity of payout to cash flow, more strongly for EPU than for PRISK. This effect operates through financial constraints: it intensifies among firms with higher constraint scores and larger near-term debt maturities, indicating that refinancing risk and political risk act as complementary sources of pressure on payout. The effect is concentrated in institutional and tax-related political risk, and among small, domestic, and financially constrained firms, while flexible firms show no comparable retention behavior. Robustness tests, including an endogeneity correction, confirm these results and show the mechanism intensifies during periods of acute uncertainty. These findings imply that managers of constrained firms, particularly those facing near-term refinancing needs, should expect PU to tighten the link between operating performance and payout capacity. This study contributes by disentangling idiosyncratic from systematic PU within a single framework, and by identifying financial constraints as the mechanism dampening the cash flow sensitivity of payout, moving beyond the direct, governance-based effects documented in prior research.
This study examines the application of the public value(s) governance (PVsG) framework within Italy’s multi-actor refugee reception and integration system (SAI). Drawing on an exploratory case study in a rural province and semi-structured interviews with national and local actors, it investigates how public sector organizations (PSOs) and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) coproduce public value (PV) and identifies the factors shaping its strategic governance. The findings highlight the critical role of NPOs as intermediaries by facilitating service codesign, mobilizing operational capabilities, and bridging policy and practice. They also show how the municipalities’ reliance on NPO expertise creates power dynamics that shape the translation of national policies into local services, emphasizing the interplay between macro- and micro-level factors in PV cocreation. Persistent challenges remain in incorporating refugees’ perspectives, partly due to limited mechanisms for assessing impacts and outcomes and weak community-level accountability. This study contributes to the PVsG literature by showing how intermediary roles, resource dependencies, and cross-level dynamics shape the strategic governance of PV in collaborative service networks. It also provides practical guidance for managers and policymakers aiming to improve stakeholder collaboration in refugee reception and integration.
This paper empirically investigates whether board-level incentives are associated with a firm’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Investment. Using data from firms listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) from 2013 to 2025, this study finds that board-level incentives are an important determinant of CSR investment. Further quantile regression analysis reveals that the relationship is not uniform across firms. The relationship is more evident at the lower and upper quantiles of CSR investment. The additional analysis reveals that the relationship between board compensation and CSR is significantly positive for firms operating in less-competitive markets and having low growth opportunities. Overall, the results suggest that corporate governance research can benefit from incorporating board-level compensation as a governance mechanism associated with firms’ strategic social investment decisions. The findings remain robust to the alternative econometric specifications as well as tests for endogeneity.
