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.

2025

  • Tuesday, December 2, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • 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.

  • Tuesday, November 4, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Tuesday, November 4, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Tuesday, November 4, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Monday, October 13, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Thursday, October 9, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Thursday, September 25, 2025 - CCGR, NCGN 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!

  • Monday, September 15, 2025 - JFQA 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.

  • Friday, September 5, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Friday, August 15, 2025 - NCGN Nordic Corporate Governance Network workshop

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

  • Wednesday, June 18, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Friday, April 4, 2025 - Magma 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.

  • Monday, March 10, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Friday, March 7, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Friday, March 7, 2025 - CCGR 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.

  • Friday, March 7, 2025 - BI Norwegian Business School 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.

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

  • Friday, February 7, 2025 - Økonomi24 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.

  • Monday, February 3, 2025 - BI Norwegian Business School 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.

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

  • Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - BI 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.

  • Sunday, September 1, 2019 - CCGR 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.

  • Sunday, February 24, 2019 - BI 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

  • Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - Oxford Business Law Blog CCGR project featured on Oxford Business Law Blog

    The ECGI working paper “Dividends and Taxes: The Moderating Role of Agency Conflicts” was recently featured on the Oxford Business Law Blog.

  • Thursday, November 9, 2017 - Harvard Law School Forum CCGR project featured on Harvard Law School Blog

    The paper “Shareholder conflicts and dividends”, forthcoming in the Review of Finance, was recently featured on the blog of Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.

  • Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - CCGR CCGR co-hosting BIs Styrekonferanse 2017

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

  • Friday, September 1, 2017 - CCGR Paper accepted for publication in Review of Finance

    The paper "Shareholder Conflicts and Dividends", has been accepted for publication in Review of Finance.

  • Friday, June 30, 2017 - CCGR Best Paper Award

    Øyvind Bøhren and Siv Staubo received the Best Paper Award from the European Financial Management Association.

    Øyvind Bøhren and Siv Staubo received the Best Paper Award from the European Financial Management Association in June 2017 for their paper "Mandatory Gender Balance and Board Independence".

  • Thursday, March 30, 2017 - CCGR CCGR funds one new project

    The CCGR has decided to fund the project “Executive Compensation in Marketing”.

  • Monday, March 13, 2017 - CCGR Hosting the 2nd BI Conference on Corporate Governance

    The CCGR will host the BI Conference on Corporate Governance for the second time on June 2, 2017. Eight leading international researchers will present new work, which will be discussed by prepared colleagues and the general audience. Participation is by invitation, only.

2016

  • Wednesday, September 28, 2016 - BI CCGR co-hosting Styrekonferansen 2016

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

  • Friday, January 1, 2016 - BI 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

  • Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - BI 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.

  • 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.

  • Thursday, September 4, 2014 - BI 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.

  • Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - BI 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.

  • Wednesday, April 2, 2014 - BI 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.

  • Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - BI 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

  • Monday, December 19, 2011 - BI 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.

  • Saturday, December 10, 2011 - BI 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.

  • Thursday, October 13, 2011 - BI Paper accepted for publication in Prosa

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

  • Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - BI 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.

  • Thursday, January 20, 2011 - BI 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?

  • Thursday, January 6, 2011 - BI 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

  • Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - BI 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.

  • Wednesday, September 8, 2010 - BI 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.

  • Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - BI 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.

  • Monday, March 1, 2010 - BI 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

  • Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - BI 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".

  • Friday, July 3, 2009 - BI 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.

  • Friday, July 3, 2009 - BI 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.

  • Friday, May 15, 2009 - BI 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.

  • Monday, March 9, 2009 - BI 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

  • Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - BI 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.

  • Monday, June 23, 2008 - BI 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.

  • Thursday, May 22, 2008 - BI 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.

  • Friday, January 11, 2008 - BI 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

  • Thursday, November 29, 2007 - BI 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

  • Tuesday, May 15, 2007 - BI The 2nd CCGR workshop

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

2006

  • Friday, September 22, 2006 - BI 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.

  • Tuesday, August 15, 2006 - BI 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).

  • Tuesday, July 11, 2006 - BI Project funding decision

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

  • Tuesday, May 9, 2006 - BI Canica grant

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

  • Thursday, April 6, 2006 - BI 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