شرق تا غرب: حاکمیت شرکت در بازارهای در حال ظهور آسیا: یک بررسی ادبی و برنامه تحقیقاتی East meets west—Corporate governance in Asian emerging markets: A literature review and research agenda

1. Introduction Recent corporate scandals in Asian emerging markets (AEMs) such as the expropriation of minority shareholders in Chinese companies like Meierya or Snjiu (Bai, Liu, Lu, Song, & Zhang, 2004) or the Satyam scandal, one of the largest fraud cases in India (Chen, Li, & Shapiro, 2010), indicate the need for effective control mechanisms in AEMs’ business systems. These scandals cost shareholders a lot of money, employees their jobs, and states large amounts of tax revenues. In today’s global world, these scandals do not only matter to the Asian economies but also frighten Western regulators and corporations who increasingly invest in AEMs (Globerman, Peng, & Shapiro, 2011). Researchers agree that improvements in firm-level corporate governance can help to avoid such scandals (e.g., Aguilera, Florackis, & Kim, 2016; Kang, Cheng, & Gray, 2007). Nevertheless, international corporate governance research has shown that the efficacy of corporate governance mechanisms significantly depends on the institutional environment (Aguilera & Jackson, 2010; Filatotchev, Jackson, & Nakajima, 2013; Oehmichen, Schrapp, & Wolff, 2017). As the institutional environment in AEMs is unique (institutions are weaker, more dynamic and more diverse than in Western countries), research might be able to learn unique things about corporate governance when looking at the AEM context. The goal of this review is to systemize our current knowledge in this emerging field of research. This review analyses and synthesizes the extant knowledge about characteristics of the two major firm-internal corporate governance actors, namely owners and board members (Denis & McConnell, 2003), their consequential effects on firm-level outcomes, and potential contingency factors shaping these mechanisms in the AEM context. Specifically, this study will answer the following questions: What do we know about characteristics of internal corporate governance actors in AEMs, their impact on firm-level outcomes, and contingency factors? Which questions do researchers have to answer to extend our knowledge about these characteristics and their underlying mechanisms, outcomes, and contingency factors, specifically in AEMs as well as globally? Thereby, AEMs represent a relevant research object because of their economic weight. For instance, Asia is the world’s most populated region (Barkema, Chen, George, Luo, & Tsui, 2015), and China is the second largest economy in GDP attracting most foreign direct investment (Witt & Redding, 2014). AEMs exhibit a unique institutional setting of weak formal institutions, diverse institutions, and an institutional dynamism. This unique setting is the result of pairing the focus on emerging markets, defined as “low-income, rapid-growth countries using economic liberalization as their primary engine of growth” (Hoskisson, Eden, Lau, & Wright, 2000, p. 249) and the focus on the Asian region that is characterized by a great diversity in cultural, philosophic, and religious traditions (Barkema et al., 2015). These institutional particularities of AEMs allow researchers to advance the theoretical understanding of corporate governance in three dimensions. First, the institutional void context of AEMs with failing market mechanisms reveals tasks of corporate governance actors beyond agency cost reduction. Hence, this study proposes how to extend principles of agency theory in corporate governance research.