ABSTRACT
This book presents research that aims to contribute to both practical and academic understanding of corporate governance and its regulation, particularly the use of comply-or-explain codes of corporate governance. The previous four chapters have presented research into four areas of corporate governance: board evaluation; gender diversity; corporate responsibility and executive remuneration, each of which is regulated in whole or in part by comply-or-explain code provisions. This chapter aims to synthesise this research and compare it against some of the theories presented in Chapter 3. It reviews what the empirical evidence tells us about both the role of the board and the effect of soft regulation on board and organisational behaviour. In doing so the aim is to bring the theory and practice of corporate governance regulation closer together in circumstances where the gap has been widening (Aguilera and Cuervo-Cazzuro 2009).
