Corporate Governance Research in the Wake of a Systemic Crisis: Lessons and Opportunities from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented opportunity to advance research on how various corporate governance mechanisms shape firms’ decision-making, survival and success. In the short term, corporate governance research could pinpoint which mechanisms in place before the pandemic (e.g., ownership structure, board attributes, executive compensation) will shape corporate responses, thus affecting firms’ survival in the post-pandemic period. In the long term, the crisis will trigger structural changes in governance mechanisms to enable firms to either prevent or respond to the occurrences of potentially similar events. In the reminder of this essay, we will first discuss the peculiar nature of the recent crisis in relation to other recent crises. Then, we will analyse the impact of Covid-19 on five key areas in the field of corporate governance (i.e., corporate purpose, ownership structure, board of directors, executive compensation and accountability) and, for each of them, we will suggest a series of research questions that contribute to redirecting and advancing the domain.