Problem - Choose TWO different companies operating in similar industries and they must be of a similar size, from the Top 500 companies (measured by market Capitalisation). ONE company must be from the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) and ONE company must be from New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). (Companies chosen should NOT be FINANCE COMPANIES or BANKS).
Using the TWO different companies chosen, students are required to SCORE these companies on their Corporate Governance Disclosures made in their most recent Annual Report. (A higher score means better or more informative corporate governance disclosures.) Note: The Annual Reports for the TWO companies MUST be from the same year. The month does not matter, but they must have the same year.
Students should consider the following (but NOT limited to) as a part of their research
1) What TWO companies meet the criteria for the assignment and all group members agree on?
2) Why is corporate governance important?
3) What corporate governance items are disclosed by each company?
4) Do companies listed on different stock exchanges disclose the same governance information?
5) What corporate governance items disclosed are important and should be included as a part of the scoring?
6) What scoring system should be used? This is important and needs to be clearly articulated in the presentation.
7) Do all corporate governance disclosures have the same weighting? That is, are all governance disclosures equally important or are some more important than others and perhaps have a higher weighting in the overall score.
8) Given the scoring outcome, can the group say that one company has better corporate governance than the other company? How does this relate back to item 2 above?