There has been much recent attention devoted to corporate governance issues, namely executive compensation (Jensen et al, 2004), corporate control (Dyck and Zingales, 2004) and hostile takeovers (Franks and Mayer, 1994). This new stream of empirical literature is well anchored on two powerful explanations of the firm’s structure and control – agency and transaction costs theories. However, there has been an excessive concentration on a specific type of institution – the manufacturing stock market quoted public corporation, usually headquartered in English speaking or “common law” countries. This research bias can be justified both by the theoretical attention given to the separation of ownership and control and by the availability of data for companies that are under the scrutiny of compulsory auditing. Recently, a new stream of research has emphasized the importance of other types of institutions, such as family firms. Anderson and Reed (2003) have even obtained the counter intuitive finding that American family firms have systematically outperformed publicly owned peers. La Porta et al (1999) have underlined the need for a better understanding of corporate ownership across the world. One third neglect of current research regards the study of intermediary management levels, as stressed by Ortin-Angel and Salas-Fumas (1998). This research project attempts at contributing to fill the previous gaps found in the empirical literature in corporate governance. The Portuguese case, as a non Anglo-Saxon, medium income economy, with a predominance of family owned firms and the services sector is an interesting research case with a potential for extrapolation into related economies. The comparison with the Anglo-Saxon countries will not be neglected either. The work should include the following four subtopics: Executive compensation in Portuguese firms. We plan to study the implication of firm specific variables such as size, age, ownership or nationality and exec...