Gobierno Corporativo: los problemas, estado actual de la discusión y un ejercicio de medición para Argentina[Corporate Governance: the problems, the current stage of the discussion and a measurement exercise for Argentina]

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 emphasized 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 parts of the economy could be increasing its costs, and the society as a whole could loss welfare. 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 spread 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. Here we apply a computed general equilibrium model to examine the consequences of this policy recommendation on welfare in a developing country of medium size and level of development. Since the gains in terms of reductions of the cost of capital are conditional, we ask here which reduction in the cost of capital compensates for the economy the greater audit costs to improve corporate governance. 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 general equilibrium model. We conclude with a note of caution.