| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to investigate whether corporate governance failures facilitate crime.
There is an arising awareness of corporate crime and the huge consequences of corporate
governance failures. Therefore, we explore if certain corporate governance features are
used differently by companies that have been convicted of corporate crime, compared to
companies that have not. Previous literature gives indications of how some corporate
governance features can be misused to facilitate crime and we want to elaborate on this
literature by investigating the changes in corporate governance features around the time
of crimes. We explore the changes in audit firm, the changes of board members, the
changes in the share of female directors and the share of tax haven subsidiaries and secrecy
jurisdiction subsidiaries.
We investigate these relationships by using a difference-in-difference design, which allows
us to discover differences in the companies’ behavior relating to these corporate governance
features. In addition, we conduct an event study that unveils trends around the period of
the crime and the conviction date.
The results of our analysis show indications that companies who commit crime behave
differently than companies who have not with regards to the changes in the share of female
directors around the time of the crime. They also behave differently with regards to
changes in auditor firms, board members and tax haven subsidiaries around the time of the
conviction. On the contrary, no evidence is found with regards to a relationship between
the share of secrecy jurisdiction subsidiaries and crime. As companies that commit crime
use several corporate governance features in a different way than similar companies that
have not committed crime, our results suggest that some corporate governance features
are used to facilitate crime. | en_US |
