Annual Members Meeting 2012

26 - 27 April 2012
•
Stockholm. Sweden

The ECGI Annual Members Meeting 2012 took place in Stockholm on 26-27 April. On Friday 27 April, the General Assembly and Annual Lecture were held at the Royal Coin Cabinet, Stockholm. ECGI Fellow, Marco Pagano, Professor of Economics, Facoltà di Economia at the Università di Napoli Federico II, gave the Annual Lecture (which was open to the public) on the theme of Market Transparency and Company Disclosure. The dinner for ECGI members and invited guests took place the night before. During the dinner, the winners of the 2012 Working Paper prizes were announced.

2012 Working Paper Prize-giving:

The Standard Life Investments Finance Prize was won by Marc Goergen, Cardiff University - Cardiff Business School, Noel O’Sullivan and Geoff Wood, University of Sheffield with:

Private Equity Takeovers and Employment in the UK: some Empirical Evidence (ECGI Finance Working Paper No. 310/2011)

The Allen & Overy Law Prize was won by John Armour and Wolf-Georg Ringe from the University of Oxford with:

European Company Law 1999-2010: Renaissance and Crisis (ECGI Law Working Paper No. 175/2011)

The ECGI would like to thank the Swedish Corporate Governance Forum for its sponsorship of the 2012 General Assembly and Annual Lecture

Information

Address:

PwC Dublin

Contact:

Elaine McPartlan

European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

admin@ecgi.org

26 April - Day 1

19:00

Dinner and Presentation of the 2012 ECGI Working Paper Series Prizes

27 April - Day 2

09:00

- 10:45

Annual General Meeting - The Royal Coin Cabinet

10:45

- 11:00

Break

11:00

- 12:30

Annual Lecture - Market Transparency and Company Disclosure

Moderator:

Erik Berglof

Annual Lecture - Market Transparency and Company Disclosure

Time:

11:00h

- 12:30h

Transparency has two dimensions that financial economists and accounting experts tend to analyse separately even though they are closely related. The first dimension concerns the process of security trading: a security market is transparent insofar as its participants are aware of each others' behaviour (e.g. know current bid and ask quotes or recent transaction prices). The second dimension of transparency instead depends on the disclosure decisions of companies: it concerns how much information investors have about company 'fundamentals'. In most cases, both forms of transparency lower transaction costs, and ultimately benefit firms via lower cost of capital and/or better access to external finance. But they may also impose some costs on firms which in some cases may opt for a degree of transparency that is socially inefficient, This in turn could create a rationale for regulatory intervention. Moreover, the two types of transparency are not independent of each other: for instance, if markets are very transparent, firms may want to be less transparent.