BI Research Centre

Centre for Corporate Governance Research

The CCGR aims to produce high-quality research on how ownership and governance of firms impact value-creation and the welfare of firms’ stakeholders.

News

2026

  • CCGR, NBER, NYU, NBIM Tuesday, January 13, 2026

    Call for Papers: Climate and Nature Finance

    Conference on Climate and Nature Finance: April 24, 2026, organized by the Centre for Corporate Governance Research (CCGR) at BI Norwegian Business School, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and NYU Stern School of Business BI, with generous support from Norges Bank Investment Management.

    Call for Papers
    Climate and Nature Finance
    Oslo, Norway — April 23–24, 2026
     
     Climate and nature finance studies how financial markets and their participants are affected by climate change and nature loss, how they adapt and respond to the associated risks, and how they affect the flow of resources towards green and sustainable modes of production, especially in sectors such as agriculture, energy, and manufacturing.
     
    To promote research on climate and nature finance, BI Norwegian Business School (BI), the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and NYU Stern School of Business, with generous support from Norges Bank Investment Management, will convene a research conference in Oslo, Norway, on Friday, April 24th, 2026. The conference will focus broadly on the interactions between climate change, nature, capital markets, corporate governance, and the real economy.
     
     The program will be organized by Caroline Flammer (Columbia University and NBER), Stefano Giglio (Yale University and NBER), Johannes Stroebel (NYU and NBER), and Janis Berzins, Salvatore Miglietta, Bogdan Stacescu, Stephen Szaura, and Adam Winegar (BI Norwegian Business School). It will feature full-paper presentations as well as a poster session for PhD students. There will be an industry-focused event hosted by the Centre for Corporate Governance Research at BI on the afternoon of Thursday, April 23rd, and a conference dinner that evening.
     
     The organizers welcome submissions of theoretical as well as empirical papers. Submissions from researchers with and without NBER affiliations, from those whose primary affiliation is in the academic, government, and business sector, and from those who are early in their careers are encouraged. Please do not submit papers that have already been accepted for publication. Submissions should include a conflict-of-interest disclosure statement for any collaborators who have a financial stake in the outcome of the research. Submissions should be uploaded by 11:59pm ET on Sunday, February 1st, 2026 via the following link:
     
    https://conference.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=CNFs26 
     
     Conference participants will be responsible for covering their own travel and accommodation expenses. BI will assist with booking local accommodation.
     
     Authors of papers selected for the program will be notified by late February 2026.
     
     Please direct questions about this project to confer@nber.org.

2025

  • CCGR Tuesday, December 2, 2025

    Eierkonferansen 2025

    CCGR participated in NHOs Eierkonferansen 2025. A great opportunity to network, present research results with impact, and discuss the importance of ownership - also part of our cooperation with FBN Norsk Eierskap.

  • External link Tuesday, December 2, 2025

    BI Research Day

    CCGR participated in the BI Research Day event on 13 November. A great setup for sharing useful information and planning for the future. Many thanks to Bo Becker from Stockholm School of Economics for a great talk.

  • CCGR Tuesday, November 4, 2025

    Guest lecture from Norsk Hydro

    Guest lecture by Aksel Fridstrøm and Kristin Karlstad from Norsk Hydro: students from the Master in Sustainable Finance programme learned about the sustainability strategy of a large integrated aluminium producer.

  • CCGR Tuesday, November 4, 2025

    Guest lecture from FBN Norsk Familieeierskap

    Guest lecture by Lulla Hokholt and Cecilie Grønntun from FBN Norsk Familieeierskap: students from the Corporate Governance course learned about Norwegian family firms and the challenges of coordinating ownership, family, and business.

  • CCGR Tuesday, November 4, 2025

    Guest lecture from Simon Møkster Shipping

    Guest lecture by Simone Møkster from Simon Møkster Shipping: an opportunity for first-year students in the Master of Sustainable Finance to learn about the sustainability strategy of a family-owned offshore shipping company.

  • CCGR Monday, October 13, 2025

    Guest lecture from DNB Asset Management

    Guest lecture by Kristine Alm Karsrud from DNB Asset Management on investing in the blue economy: a great opportunity for students to learn about the sustainable investment process.

  • CCGR Thursday, October 9, 2025

    Guest lecture from NBIM

    Guest lecture by Ola Peter Gjessing, Lead Investment Stewardship Manager in Norges Bank Investment Management, in the Corporate Governance course: a very interesting overview of the role of responsible institutional investors.

  • CCGR, NCGN Thursday, September 25, 2025

    NCGN Workshop

    The Nordic Corporate Governance Workshop took place at BI Norwegian Business School on 11 and 12 September. Many thanks to all the participants!

  • JFQA Monday, September 15, 2025

    Collateral Damage: Low-Income Borrowers Depend on Income-Based Lending

    New paper by Mark Garmaise, Mark Jansen, and Adam Winegar in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

  • CCGR Friday, September 5, 2025

    Updated section on the wealth tax on the CCGR Information Hub

    New and updated information on the Norwegian wealth tax and the link it creates between owners and firms on the Information Hub.

  • NCGN Friday, August 15, 2025

    Nordic Corporate Governance Network workshop

    The Nordic Corporate Governance 2025 workshop will be held at BI on 11 and 12 September.

  • CCGR Wednesday, June 18, 2025

    The 5th BI Conference on Corporate Governance

    The CCGR hosted the BI Conference on Corporate Governance for the fifth time on June 17, 2025.

    Many thanks to the presenters, discussants and all the participants to the 5th BI Conference on Corporate Governance.

  • Magma Friday, April 4, 2025

    Styrer og bærekraft: Norske børsnoterte selskap møter forventninger med kontroll heller enn strategi

    Publication by Janicke Rasmussen, Jovana Karajanov, and Jan Ketil Arnulf in Magma.

  • CCGR Monday, March 10, 2025

    Underperformance in Family Successions: The Role of Outside Work Experience

    New working paper by Irena Kustec, Charlotte Ostergaard, and Amir Sasson. Outside experience from the years spent outside the family firm increases the performance of family firm CEO successors. Family CEO-successors that do not leave the family firm underperform successors from controlling families with outside work experience, who perform on par with professional CEO-successors.

  • CCGR Friday, March 7, 2025

    Women in venture capital-backed companies

    A new paper by Gosia Ryduchowska, Fabrizio Core, and Su Wang finds that female employment in startups increases following VC investment. However, this is mostly driven by hiring in supporting roles. Those are the types of jobs that traditionally have a higher proportion of women. The sample includes 5,560 U.S. companies backed by venture capital from 2010 to 2020, corresponding to approximately 0.8 million job positions.

  • CCGR Friday, March 7, 2025

    New section on Women in Business on the CCGR Information Hub

    New section on Women in Business added to the CCGR Information Hub. It presents statistics on women as board members, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.

  • BI Norwegian Business School Friday, March 7, 2025

    Women's Day at BI

    The International Women's Day was celebrated at BI with a series of interesting presentations. CCGR is honoured to have been invited to the event to introduce new research results about women in Norwegian business life.

  • CCGR Report 2/2025 Wednesday, February 12, 2025

    Norwegian Green Bond Market

    New research report by Gosia Ryduchowska and Moqi Groen-Xu on the Norwegian market for green bonds: market size, issuers, investors, liquidity, pricing, and credit ratings.

  • Økonomi24 Friday, February 7, 2025

    Tallenes tale: Dette betaler bedriftseierne i formuesskatt

    Eierne av familiebedrifter har brukt en stadig større andel av sine likvide midler til å betale formuesskatten, viser en grundig kartlegging fra Handelshøyskolen BI. Einar Ravndal skriver om tall fra CCGRs forskningsrapport i Økonomi24.

  • BI Norwegian Business School Monday, February 3, 2025

    Lunch with the BI president, the CCGR council and CCGR stakeholders

    Lunch with the BI president and CCGR stakeholders - and the launch for the CCGR research report on Norwegian firms. A great opportunity to take stock of where we are, and make plans for the future.

  • CCGR Research Report 1/2025 Friday, January 31, 2025

    An Overview of Norwegian Firms

    New research report by Janis Berzins and Bogdan Stacescu on Norwegian firms: major trends, financial performance, industry structure, geography, ownership and governance.

2024

2023

2021

2020

2019

  • BI Tuesday, November 12, 2019

    Doctoral scholarship in corporate governance

    The Centre for Corporate Governance Research is inviting applications for a doctoral scholarship in corporate governance, start date August 2020.

  • CCGR Sunday, September 1, 2019

    Charlotte Østergaard is the new director of the CCGR

    Øyvind Bøhren, who has been the CCGR’s founding director since 2005, retired on September 1, and professor Charlotte Østergaard is the new director of the CCGR.

  • BI Sunday, February 24, 2019

    CCGR decided to fund three new projects

    CCGR decided to fund the three new projects "Family Firms, Networks, and Constraints", "The Effects of Firm Ownership Structure on Firm Performance: A Labor Market Channel" and "Conflicts in Private Family Firms".

2018

2017

2016

  • BI Wednesday, September 28, 2016

    CCGR co-hosting Styrekonferansen 2016

    The CCGR co-hosted BI’s annual Practitioner conference on corporate governance.

  • BI Friday, January 1, 2016

    CCGR decided to fund two new projects

    The CCGR has decided to fund the two new projects “Capital Structure and Entrepreneurial Wealth“ and “The Impact of Managerial Biases on Firm Performance and Policies“.

2015

2014

  • BI Tuesday, November 4, 2014

    Paper accepted for publication in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Selskabsret

    We are happy to announce that the paper "Økonomiske særtrekk ved stiftelser" has been accepted for publication in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Selskabsret.

  • External link Sunday, October 5, 2014

    The 15th Workshop on Corporate Governance and Investment

    The CCGR hosted this workshop on October 3 and 4, where researchers from European business schools presented and discussed twelve papers.

  • BI Thursday, September 4, 2014

    Paper accepted for publication in European Financial Management

    We are happy to announce that the paper "Mandatory Gender Balance and Board Independence" has been accepted for publication in European Financial Management.

  • BI Wednesday, June 4, 2014

    Paper accepted for publication in Review of Financial Studies

    We are happy to announce that the paper "Liquidity and Shareholder Activism" has been accepted for publication in Review of Financial Studies.

  • BI Wednesday, April 2, 2014

    New working paper

    Liquidity and Shareholder Activism. This paper studies blockholders' incentives to intervene in corporate governance. Theory suggests activists may recoup expenses through informed trading of target firms' stock when stocks are liquid. The paper show that stock liquidity increases the probability of activism, but less so for potentially overvalued fi rms where privately informed blockholders may have greater incentives to sell their stake than to intervene. It also document that activists accumulate more stocks in targets the more liquid is the stock. The paper conclude that liquidity helps overcome the free-rider problem and induces activism via pre-activism accumulation of target firms' shares.

  • BI Wednesday, March 12, 2014

    Three new projects

    The CCGR solicited proposals for research projects in November 2013. Three proposals successfully passed the evaluation, and will have startup dates during spring 2014.

2013

2012

2011

  • BI Monday, December 19, 2011

    Stockholder Conflicts and Dividend Policy

    This paper examines how majority stockholders use the firm’s payout policy to influence this conflict in a large sample of Norwegian private firms. They find that the stronger the potential conflict between the stockholders as reflected by the firm’s ownership structure, the higher the proportion of earnings paid out as dividends. This tendency to reduce stockholder conflicts by dividend payout is more pronounced when the minority is weak and when a family’s majority block is held by a single individual. They also find evidence that a minority-friendly payout policy is associated with higher future minority investment in the firm. These results suggest that potential agency costs are mitigated by the firm’s dividend policy when the majority stockholder benefits in the longer run from not opportunistically exploiting the minority.

  • BI Saturday, December 10, 2011

    When Does Cash Matter?

    This paper studies the association between a firm’s cash holdings and its performance. Using a large sample of private companies, they find that the importance of cash for a firm’s performance varies substantially with its size and the conditions it faces. When there are negative shocks to industry or macroeconomic conditions, there is a positive association between cash holdings and performance for small firms. This association is much weaker for large firms. There is no association between cash holdings and performance for other types of conditions. Consistent with the benefits from cash holdings depending on a firm’s ability – and willingness – to use external financing, small firms borrow less than large firms during negative shocks.

  • BI Thursday, October 13, 2011

    Paper accepted for publication in Prosa

    We are happy to announce that the paper "Intens og kompakt" has been accepted for publication in Prosa.

  • BI Wednesday, May 18, 2011

    Paper accepted for publication in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice

    We are happy to announce that the paper "A Strategic Deviance Perspective on the Franchise Form of Organizing" has been accepted for publication in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice.

  • BI Thursday, January 20, 2011

    The Marginal Value of Cash, Cash Flow Sensitivities, and Bank-Finance Shocks in Nonlisted Firms

    This paper study how external financing costs affect the cash flow trade-offs made by nonlisted firms. The objective is two-fold: First, understand how nonlisted firms typically trade off financial, real, and distributive allocations; that is, how do they finance fluctuations in their cash flow. Little is known about corporate decision making in closely-held firms which do not have access to public equity and debt markets. Second, how shocks to the cost of external finance affect firms' cash flow trade-offset to what extent do they substitute between external and internal finance and to what extent do dividends and investments adjust?

  • BI Thursday, January 6, 2011

    Laddering in Initial Public Offering Allocations

    This paper study how Tying Initial Public Offering (IPO) allocations of common stock to after-listing purchases in the IPO shares, a process referred to as IPO laddering, has resulted in large-scale investigations of the major investment banks by the SEC and the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). With a new and unique dataset of 16,593 IPO allocations on the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE), we confirm the SECs suspicion that IPO allocations are dependent on after-listing trading.

2010

  • BI Tuesday, December 14, 2010

    Paper accepted for publication in Journal of Business Finance & Accounting

    We are happy to announce that the paper "Governance and Politics: Regulating Independence and Diversity in the Board Room" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Finance & Accounting.

  • BI Wednesday, September 8, 2010

    Working paper accepted for publication in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice

    We are happy to announce that the CCGR working paper The Dual-Agency Problem Reconsidered - A Strategic Deviance Perspective on the Franchise Form of Organizing has been accepted for publication in the Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice.

  • BI Wednesday, March 10, 2010

    Agency Conflicts and Auditing in Private Firms

    This paper provide a detailed examination of auditor effort in various agency settings of privately held firms. Specifically, they measure the relation between abnormal audit fees and firm-level characteristics related to ultimate ownership and family relationships among shareholders, CEOs, and board members. Their results contribute to understanding agency costs for an economically important subset of firms (i.e., private companies) that have received limited attention in the literature.

  • BI Monday, March 1, 2010

    The Dual-Agency Problem Reconsidered - A Strategic Deviance Perspective on the Franchise Form of Organizing

    This paper propose that a franchisor cannot assess and control opportunism without comparative information from plural form contractual arrangements provided by both franchisee relationships and operating its own units. Moving beyond dyadic perspectives, their strategic deviance model suggests why franchisors accept deviant behavior that results from vertical and horizontal agency problems.

2009

  • BI Tuesday, December 15, 2009

    New journal publication

    The paper "Unoterte aksjeselskaper er viktige, uutforskede og spesielle" written by Janis Berzins and Øyvind Bøhren is published in "Praktisk Økonomi og Finans, nr. 2, 2009".

  • BI Friday, July 3, 2009

    Working paper - Liquidity and Shareholder Activism

    This paper documents that stock liquidity improves shareholders’ incentive to monitor management. Using a hand-collected sample of contested proxy solicitations and shareholder proposals as occurrences of shareholder activism, they find that poor firm performance increases the probability of shareholder activism and that this relationship is much stronger for firms with liquid stock than for other firms. The conclusion that liquidity improves monitoring is robust to different measures of firm performance and liquidity. They also document that target shareholders earn positive abnormal returns on the announcement date of activism and conclude that shareholder activism creates shareholder value.

  • BI Friday, July 3, 2009

    Working paper accepted for publication in Accounting Review

    We are happy to announce that the CCGR working paper "Auditor independence in a private firm and low litigation risk setting" has been accepted for publication in the Accounting Review. The authors Ole-Kristian Hope and John Christian Langli are the first to receive the CCGR grant of NOK 100.000 for publication in an A journal.

  • BI Friday, May 15, 2009

    The 4th CCGR workshop

    Two ongoing CCGR projects and seven project plans were presented and discussed. Info about the project types, titles, team leaders, team members, and project outlines, can be found under the "Projects" tab.

  • BI Monday, March 9, 2009

    Eight new projects

    The CCGR solicited proposals for research projects in November 2008. Eight proposals successfully passed the evaluation, and will have startup dates during spring 2009.

2008

  • BI Wednesday, October 1, 2008

    Corporate finance and governance in firms with limited liability: Basic characteristics

    This study analyzes a wide range of corporate finance and governance characteristics in all active Norwegian firms with limited liability, including about 77,000 nonlisted (private) firms and 135 listed (public) firms per year, over the period 1994-2005. The unexplored nature of nonlisted firms makes us address a large set of characteristics, and to focus more on describing overall patterns in the data rather than making elaborate tests of behavioral hypotheses.

  • BI Monday, June 23, 2008

    Working Paper - Risk management with cash and insurance in non-listed firms

    This study analyzes corporate risk management with property insurance in small and medium sized firms that are privately held. The paper documents that the use of insurance relates positively to CEO salary and negatively to CEO ownership and ownership concentration.

  • BI Thursday, May 22, 2008

    May 22-24: Conference on the Corporate finance and governance of privately held firms

    Non-listed firms probably account for the largest portion of value creation and employment in virtually any country around the world. These firms are likely to evolve and utilize governance structures and to face specific financing challenges that are very different from those of publicly traded corporations. The objective of this international conference is to take some initial steps toward a better understanding of how privately held firms are governed and financed.

  • BI Friday, January 11, 2008

    The 3rd CCGR workshop

    Seven teams presented and discussed their findings after about 15 months of research activity. Most of the teams are now close to having a working paper ready.

2007

  • BI Thursday, November 29, 2007

    Working Paper - Auditor independence in a private firm setting

    Although private firms predominate in the economy worldwide, there has been little, if any, prior research on auditor independence in a private firm setting. Ole-Kristian Hope and John Christian Langli investigate whether auditors are willing to sacrifice their independence in exchange for retaining clients that pay abnormally large fees for audit and/or non-audit services. Media exposure: Aftenposten, Den norske Revisorforening, NSM BI

  • BI Tuesday, May 15, 2007

    The 2nd CCGR workshop

    Seven research teams presented and discussed the preliminary findings after half a year of research activity.

2006

  • BI Friday, September 22, 2006

    The 1st CCGR workshop

    The objective of this kickoff event was to encourage cooperation and mutual support across the research teams. Each team presented its research plan, which was commented upon by a discussant and the general audience.

  • BI Tuesday, August 15, 2006

    Financial support from NFR

    Triggered by a private gift to fund research projects and a chaired professorship in corporate governance, the Research Council of Norway (NFR) granted NOK 2.5 to the CCGR (socalled Gaveforsterking).

  • BI Tuesday, July 11, 2006

    Project funding decision

    The CCGR granted financial support to three seed projects and ten regular projects.

  • BI Tuesday, May 9, 2006

    Canica grant

    Canica AS decided to support the research activities of the CCGR by a NOK 5 mill. grant.

  • BI Thursday, April 6, 2006

    Invitation for research proposals

    The CCGR announced its intention to fund promising research in corporate governance by specifying key characteristics of a successful project description