Venture capital (VC) backed firms face neither the governance requirements nor a major separation of ownership and control of their public peers. These differences suggest that independent directors could play a unique role on private firm boards. This paper explores the dynamics of VC-backed...

This paper surveys the economic literature on boards of directors. Although a legal requirement for many organizations, boards are also an endogenously determined governance mechanism for addressing agency problems inherent to many organizations. Formal theory on boards of directors has been...

We investigate the effects of female executives on gender-specific wage distributions and firm performance. We find that female leadership has a positive impact at the top of the female wage distribution and a negative impact at the bottom. Moreover, the impact of female leadership on firm...

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different products than manufacturing exporters. In particular, high market-specific fixed...

What makes independent directors perform their monitoring duty? One possible reason is that they are worried about being sanctioned by regulators if they do not monitor sufficiently well. Using unique features of the Chinese financial market, we estimate the extent to which independent...