Boards

Governance and the Financial Crisis

Should boards of financial firms be blamed for the financial crisis' Using a large sample of data on nonfinancial and financial firms for the period...

The Role of Boards of Directors in Corporate Governance: A Conceptual Framework & Survey

This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Hermalin and Weisbach (2003) survey....

Delaware and the Transformation of Corporate Governance

The corporate governance arrangements of publicly traded companies have been transformed over the past four decades. Various observers have...

Understanding the Motives for Director Selection

Director selection is crucial in corporate governance, but little is known about the relative importance of individual director attributes in the...

Beauty and Appearance in Corporate Director Elections

We study the role of facial appearance in corporate director (re-)elections by means of director photographs published in annual reports. We find that...

Centros, California’s “Women on Boards” Statute and the Scope of Regulatory Competition

In its 1999 Centros decision, the European Court of Justice affirmed that the EU right of establishment protects a corporation’s right to select a...

Board Dynamics Over the Startup Life Cycle

We explore the dynamics of venture capital (VC)-backed startup boards using novel data on director entry, exit, and characteristics. At...

IPO Price Formation and Board Gender Diversity

We study the relation between board gender diversity and initial public offering (IPO) price formation. We find that IPOs experience significantly...

Similarity Breeds Trust: Political Homophily and CEO-Board Communication

We find evidence suggesting that similarity of political views between the CEO and independent directors (“political homophily”) encourages the...

Mind the gap: The Age Dissimilarity between the Chair and the CEO

We study the relation between the chair of the board of directors and the CEO. We argue that substantial age dissimilarity between the two - giving rise to...

Corporate Governance of Banks after the Financial Crisis

Board Ancestral Diversity and Firm Performance Volatility

We proxy for board members’ differences in opinions and values using directors’ ancestral origins and show that diversity has costs and benefits,...