Cor­por­ate Gov­ernance and Entrepreneur­ship

Course content

Corporate governance involves a set of relationships between a company’s management, board, shareholders and stakeholders. It also provides the structure and systems through which the company is directed and its objectives are set, and the means of attaining those objectives are determined, by aligning the interests and monitoring performance of the relevant company actors (OECD,2023).

The course is a topic course, covering various issues in corporate governance. We begin with an overview of agency issues in financial contracting, and their implications for an entrepreneurs' access to financing. We continue by discussing the role of corporate governance mechanisms (i.e., board of directors, incentives) in faciliating the growth of entrepreneurial (startup) firms and then broaden the discussion to other types of companies, including the publicly listed corporations. We then continue by looking deeeper into design and role of selected corporate governance mechanims, namely incentive schemes, ownership and board of directors. For each of these, we review the most relevant theories and then apply them to various types of firms (e.g., family owned firms, public corporations with dispersed ownership). For most of the topics, the standard economics literature will be complemented with insights from behavioral theory of corporate governance.