The state of corporate governance research

This paper, which serves as an introduction to the special issue on corporate governance of the Review of Financial Studies, reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate governance that were presented in a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER's) corporate governance project. Each of the papers represents state-of-the-art research in an important area of corporate governance research. For each of these areas, we discuss the importance of the area and the questions it focuses on, how the paper in the special issue makes a significant contribution to this area, and what we do and do not know about the area. We discuss in turn work on shareholders and shareholder activism, directors, executives and their compensation, controlling shareholders, comparative corporate governance, cross-border investments in global capital markets, and the political economy of corporate governance.