Corporate governance in European IPOs

Establishing effective corporate governance is most important at the time of an initial public offering (IPO), because the IPO represents a significant step by a company toward moving to the public arena. This chapter focuses on three characteristics that help describe structure of the board of directors at the time of IPO: board size (i.e., the number of members on a board), board independence (i.e., the proportion of non-executive members on the board), and board leadership (i.e., the choice to overlap the roles of CEO and chairman of the board). The chapter presents empirical evidence from a sample of 969 companies that went public between 1995 and 2011 in France, Germany, and Italy that shows how these companies differ from their US and UK counterparts.