March 6, 2006 Voluntary Adoption of Corporate Governance Mechanisms: The Role of Domestic and International Governance Standards Anita Anand 1 , Frank Milne 2 , and Lynnette Purda 3 As this draft is preliminary, please do not cite without permission. Comments are welcome. 1 Visiting Olin Scholar, Yale Law School and Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, anita.anand@yale.edu . 2 Bank of Montreal Professor, Queen’s Economics Department, Queen’s University, milnef@qed.econ.queensu.ca . 3 Assistant Professor, Queen’s School of Business, Queen’s University, lpurda@business.queensu.ca . This paper was presented at the 2006 American Association of Law Schools’ annual meeting in Washington D.C., Florida State University College of Law, the University of Texas School of Law and Queen’s University. We extend our thanks to participants of these sessions and to Bernie Black, Laura Beny, Brian Cheffins, Edward Iacobucci, Kate Litvak, Curtis Milhaupt, Paul Mahoney and Michael Trebilcock for their helpful comments and Roberta Romano for early discussions. We also thank Kate Andersen, Scott Cooper, Benjamin Crosskill-Macdonald, Colin Lynch, Jessie Palmer, Natalie Sediako, Nicole Stephenson, and Wei Wang for excellent research assistance. We thank the Queen’s University Advisory Research Council for funding assistance.