Corporate governance and accountability

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on corporate governance and corporate accountability, focusing on listed companies. It first surveys the normative debate on corporate responsibility, opposing two antagonistic models: the shareholder primacy model and the corporate social responsibility model. It then relates this (normative) diversity to the empirical diversity in corporate governance systems. The following sections narrow the scope of the analysis, to discuss in more details two crucial governance mechanisms and their effects on various firm outcomes: the distribution of stock ownership, and the composition and functioning of the board of directors.