Essays on Corporate Governance

This thesis includes three empirical studies on the topic of corporate governance in developed and emerging markets The first chapter investigates risk-taking behaviour across subsidiaries of U.S. multi-bank holding companies after a subsidiary-level manager is promoted to the multi-bank holding companies-level chief executive officer (CEO). Results suggest that CEO-linked bank subsidiaries take more risks compared to their non-linked counterparts. Such effect is more pronounced when CEOs carry on their employment status with respects to the associated subsidiaries post-turnover. The risk-taking practices at linked banks persist over the years following CEOs succession. The second chapter examines the predictive power of a large set of the determinants of CEO compensation by employing a machine learning tool - the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso). We find that, out of twenty-six determinants of CEO compensation gathering from literature, a group of six factors have little or no impact in driving CEO total compensation, including CEO gender, firm return on assets, diversification, risk, corporate governance e-index and board size. These results are robust to alternative methods to choose tuning parameter including elastic net, cross-validation or square-root lasso. The last chapter looks at the impact of Soviet-minded directors on Ukrainian banks performance and risk-taking behaviour. Results suggest that banks are safer in the presence of Soviet directors on board. With respects to performance, there is no evidence to show that Soviet directors have a significant impact on performance of Ukrainian banks. Further analysis reveals that the risk adverseness of Soviet directors stems from their personal value towards risk-taking action in work and business