Three Essays on Corporate Governance

Abstract

This thesis consists of three articles, each of which studies a specific aspect of corporate governance. The first paper presents empirical evidence how outside directors of public companies selectively attend board meetings to minimize risk to be involved in troublesome litigations that may be incurred by the decisions that the monitoring professionals deliver during the meetings. In the second article, I show that controlling shareholders of public firms use the entities as an outlet to liquidate their real estate holdings or/and to acquire the properties at price terms only favorable to the individuals, at the expense of minority shareholders of the public corporations. The last part of the thesis finds that private firms CEOs relocate their residence closer to corporate headquarters when the profitability of the firms deteriorates and that the profitability rebounds after the top managers move closer to the companies.