We analyze a unique database from a sample of real-world boardrooms - minutes of board meetings and board-committee meetings of eleven business companies for which the Israeli government holds a substantial equity interest. We use these data to evaluate the underlying assumptions and predictions...

This paper investigates the frequency of connections between banks and non-financial firms through board linkages and whether those connections affect lending and borrowing behavior. Although a board linkages may reduce the costs of information flows between the lender and borrower, a board...

This paper argues that once undistorted shareholder choice is ensured -- which can be done by making it necessary for hostile bidders to win a vote of shareholder support -- boards should not have veto power over takeover bids. The paper considers all of the arguments that have been offered for...

We derive conditions for when having a “busy” director on the board is harmful to shareholders and when it is beneficial. Our model allows directors to condition their monitoring choices on their co-directors' choices and to experience positive or negative monitoring synergies across firms....

This paper empirically investigates the performance of Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs). The data used covers the period from mid-1995 to mid-1999 with the sample including 884 companies (both in the A- and B-share markets). In an examination of growth, profitability and stability of...

We survey 79 private equity investors with combined AUM of over $750B about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on IRR and multiples to evaluate investments. Their LPs focus more on absolute performance. Capital structure...

This paper examines the role of public governance quality in determining the composition of a country's external liabilities and the capital structure of firms. In our theory, better institutional quality tends to promote a higher share of foreign direct investment and equity investment in total...

While staggered boards have been documented to be negatively correlated with firm valuation, such association might be due to staggered boards either bringing about lower firm value or merely reflecting the tendency of low-value firms to have staggered boards. In this paper, we use two natural...

This paper investigates empirically how the value of publicly traded firms is overall affected by arrangements protecting management from removal. A majority of U.S. public companies have staggered boards that substantially insulate the board from removal via a hostile takeover or a proxy...

This paper provides the first causal evidence about how elected local school boards affect student segregation across schools. The key identification challenge is that the composition of a school board is potentially correlated with unobserved determinants of school segregation, such as the...