European Corporate Governance: a Thematic Analysis of National Codes of Governance

Using Latent Semantic Analysis techniques to analyse the corporate governance codes of 23 EU nations, we obtain a number of new findings regarding their thematic content, variability, and convergence. We determine that these codes can be decomposed into five common themes, with substantial cross-sectional variability in their relative importance. We also find that the themes contained in these codes cluster in ways that are not fully consistent with the legal regime classifications of , leading us to construct two new country clusters. We further discover that the identity of the code issuer (e.g., government versus stock exchange) is important in explaining a code's primary theme as well as changes in theme prominence over time. Finally, we fail to find evidence of an unchecked thematic convergence towards an Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance, with some code themes converging to UK practices while others diverge.