Impact of ownership concentration and corporate governance on sustainability and stakeholder risk: An empirical Analysis of listed firms from USA, UK and Germany.

This thesis contributes to and extends the literature by observing the impact of corporate governance and different attributes of board effectiveness and firm level corporate governance mechanism on stakeholder risk. Like shareholders, stakeholders also face the agency problem and fear losing their hidden resources and efforts. This thesis defines this fear of losing resources and efforts and long-term sustainability prospects as stakeholder risk. Here, it is worthwhile to mention that this thesis also contributes to the literature by introducing a method to calculate stakeholder risk. Further, this thesis also considers shareholder and stakeholder corporate governance practices implemented in different countries while observing the impact of corporate governance and also challenges the effectiveness of a wide range features of board effectiveness on stakeholder risk. The reason is that a country where a stakeholder perspective on corporate governance prevails is not able to mitigate the stakeholder risk and vice versa. In recent times ownership concentration has received ample attention from regulatory bodies and governance institutions. The reason is that it is understood that ownership concentration reduces the agency problem and provides better control for protecting the interests of shareholders. However, limited research is available on the impact of different types of ownership concentration on corporate sustainability. Further, this limited set of empirical studies do not consider the level of scale of the firm while observing the impact of ownership concentration on sustainability. In this thesis, we also contribute by dividing the firms with ownership concentration into different scale subgroup of firms i.e. large cap firms, medium cap firms and small cap firms to see the impact of the ownership concentration of firms at different scales on sustainability. This division of firms into three different subgroups is critical to understanding the different incentives and difference in the approaches of owners at different scale firms regarding sustainability.