The ownership structure of Chinese firms has experienced significant changes over the last three decades, including the development of a fast growing stock market through which a large number of domestic firms have become publicly traded corporations. These changes have drawn increasing attention from researchers of corporate governance. In this article, we review the empirical research on corporate governance in China, with a focus on the internal and external governance mechanisms that have been investigated and the findings about the effectiveness of these mechanisms. On the basis of our review of 132 studies, we summarize the major findings and discuss the limitation of agency theory in understanding the governance issue in Chinese firms. We offer several ideas (e.g., the importance of the social context, new conceptualization of governance, different outcomes of governance, and data/method issues) for a new agenda to guide future research in the corporate governance of firms operating in the Chinese and other emerging economy contexts.

This paper investigates incentives and disincentives for risk reporting practices by global insurance companies. We examine various arguments for and against risk reporting, whether voluntary or compliance in nature. An important issue is whether reporting is dominated by shareholder, regulatory or managerial incentives. We evaluate whether current reporting practices are consistent with either political visibility, cultural effects or idiosyncratic managerial incentives. Our empirical analysis is based on (1) a content analysis of disclosures contained in annual reports of a sample of European, Asian and US global top 25 insurers between 2006 and 2012 and (2) a survey of internal business reporting practices. We re-characterise a disclosure index from prior research to examine the relation between the extent of risk disclosure and various managerial, agency and other characteristics. We predict that the extent and nature of risk disclosures depends on cultural imperatives and managerial incentives.