A presentation by
Anna Merika, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences

When: Monday, June 4, 15:00–15:50

Where: Faculty Lounge

Organized by: Faculty Research Seminars 2017-18 Series

Abstract

We explore the effect of interlocking directorates on agency conflicts and corporate performance. We employ social network analysis to discover central nodes in the network of personal and corporate connections in an international sample of 110 listed shipping companies. Assessing network structure, we find that the network of corporate leaders is denser than the network of shipping companies. The network of shipping companies is populated with many isolated nodes; the network of shipping executives and directors is populated with many cohesive groups in which the longest distance between two corporate leaders is two companies. We find that interlocking corporate leadership can help resolve agency conflicts in the shipping industry, bearing a negative effect on the magnitude of agency costs.We also discover that the extent of leadership overlaps is associated with corporate size, financial leverage and profitability.

Keywords: interlocking directorates, corporate governance, social networks, shipping industry

Anna Giannopoulou-Merika

Anna Merika received her BSc from the London School of Economics in 1985, specializing in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics, her MSc in Development Economics from the University of Salford in1987, and her PhD in Economics also from the University of Salford in 1990. She is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Deree College teaching primarily econometrics courses. She has been teaching since 1990 at Deree, at the Hellenic Open University since 2001, and periodically in professional seminars held by the industry and by domestic and foreign educational institutions.

Her teaching interests include statistics for economists, financial econometrics, forecasting and maritime financial management courses, both at the undergraduate level since 1990, and at the graduate level since 2004.

Her current research interests cover financial econometrics, forecasting, corporate governance and shipping. She is the author of a book in applied financial econometrics and of over 40 refereed research papers in international journals. She has over 700 citations in google scholar. Her articles have been published in journals like Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Maritime Policy and Management, International Journal of Business and Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Applied Business Research, Transportation Research Part E, Transportation Research Part A, etc. She has presented research papers in over 40 international conferences.