Una contribución a la evaluación de las reformas al Gobierno Corporativo de las empresas: aplicación a la Argentina

In this work we do two things: 1) an assessment of the current academic opinions and of the present situa-tion around the world, 2) a reconsideration of the quantitative evaluaton of corporate governance reforms from the perspective of general equilibrium. Corporate governance could be defined as the institutions or mechanisms, which induce incentives in listed firms, in order to recognize benefits between all the stakeholders, and to restrict the discretion over that distribution, in presence of asymmetric information and incomplete contracts. Those institutions and mechanisms are structured to solve interest conflicts; if they succeed in doing that, it is expected a fall in the cost of capital. The concept could be applied to non-listed firms and even to state owned enterprises and NGOs. There is a normative theory, which emphasizes good practices of corporate governance. A partial definition of those good practices involves the ones, which reduce capital costs for firms. But such definition does not entail that for that reductions other sectors or agents of there will be gains too; not even it is able to capture gains for the whole economy. There could be positive pecuniary externalities when the cost of capital is reduced for the whole economy but there could also be increasing costs, when new practices are intensive in scarce factors and the society as a whole could loss welfare. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between good practices at the level of shareholders (or even stakeholders) from social welfare enhancing practices. Therefore, this is a complementary study of the tradi-tional firm level and qualitative analysis. Here good practices are intended to improve welfare in a general equilibrium context, yielding benefits for both lenders and debtors of the economy. Some practices of corporate governance, applied in the international context, and more precisely in the United States, had been promoted as methods to be replicated in less developed countries to improve their access to international finance. Current evidence is presented in cross-country econometric studies. Do those recommenda-tions pass the test of social welfare evaluation? Here we apply a computed dynamic general equilibrium model to try to evaluate the cost-benefit of the cor-porate governance reform in a developing country of medium size and level of development and low capitalization. We discuss the problems, present a survey on the literature on theory and practice of corporate governance, we discuss the problem in the local perspective of Argentina (which is the case of study), and the international arena following the OECD literature. Finally, an empirical literature is made to study the potential gains in a computed dynamic general equilibrium model.