This paper analyses the relationship between internal and external corporate governance mechanisms and the performance of UK companies within the context of the Cadbury Committee's Code of Best Practice. The results show, first, that the market for corporate control is an effective governance mechanism that may be regarded as a substitute for the other mechanisms.Second, there is a weak relationship between the internal governance mechanisms and performance. Third, there is also little evidence that with firms in the top and bottom performance deciles have different internal governance characteristics. The results therefore raise questions about the efficacy of imposing prescriptive internal governance mechanisms on companies, particularly given that the market for corporate control has been shown to be an effective means of reducing agency costs.

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"In this paper we conduct an out-of-sample test of two behavioural theories that have been proposed to explain momentum in stock returns. We test the gradual-information-diffusion model of Hong and Stein (1999) and the investor conservatism bias model of Barberis et al. (1998) in a sample of 13 European stock markets during the period 1988 to 2001. These two models predict that momentum comes from the (i) gradual dissemination of firm-specific information and (ii) investors' failure to update their beliefs sufficiently when they observe new public information. The findings of this study are consistent with the predictions of the behavioural models of Hong and Stein's (1999) and Barberis et al. (1998). The evidence shows that momentum is the result of the gradual diffusion of private information and investors' psychological conservatism reflected on the systematic errors they make in forming earnings expectations by not updating them adequately relative to their prior beliefs and by undervaluing the statistical weight of new information." Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2005.

This study represents a first attempt in the UK literature to split total pay into salary, annual bonus and share options for the purpose of empirically verifying how each is related to executive performance. As predicted from earlier studies on total pay, salaries were found primarily determined by firm size. Contarary to prior research, however, our findings suggest a pronounced link does exist between performance and pay over both the short- and long-term. This is manifested particularly by the magnitude of the coefficient estimates found between changes in shareholders return and changes in executive share options. This finding strongly suggests that the leverage executives achieve, on average, in their rewards as share prices increase may well be substantial; a finding that has not been captured in previous research on executive remuneration and which is of considerable relevance to the current corporate governance debates.Executive Pay, Share Options, Bonus, Salary, Black-scholes, Performance,

This study extena's prior research by separating executive remuneration into salary and annual bonus for the purpose of empirically verifying their determinants. A model is introduced to estimate the extent to which pay and its determinants are related. Based on a net sample of 90 large UK firms, salary was found to be strongly related to firm size, as opposed to annual bonus, which was modestly associated with both firm performance and size. An important discovery was that salary showed no relationship to a firm's economic performance. The inability to find any association between salary and performance suggests that each component of pay has a different set of determining factors. 0 Blackwell Publishers U d b n d o n School of Economics 1996. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ud, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford. OX4 IJF, and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02141. USA.Hill,C. and Phan,P. (1991). 'CEO tenure as a determinant of CEO pay'.