Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information...

Busy directors have been widely criticized as being ineffective. However, we hypothesize that busy directors offer advantages for many firms. While busy directors may be less effective monitors, their experience and contacts arguably make them excellent advisors. Among IPO firms, which have...

Regulators, proxy advisors and shareholders are regularly calling for independent directors. However, at the same time, independent directors commonly engage in numerous outside activities potentially reducing their time and commitment with the particular firm. Using Tobin's Q as an...

We shed new light on the corporate governance role of institutional investors in markets where concentrated ownership and business groups are prevalent. When companies have controlling shareholders, institutional investors, as minority shareholders, can play only a limited role in corporate...

In the bank-borrower setting, a firm's existing lender may exploit its positional advantage to extract rents from the firm in subsequent financings. Analogously, a startup's existing venture capital investors (VCs) may dilute the founder through a follow-on financing from these same VCs (an...

In this paper, using a unique dataset of joint-stock companies, we empirically examine the determinants of the choice and size of the collective executive board, a core element of the multi-tier board system of Russian firms. Our empirical evidence strongly suggests that the need of company...

Durch vermehrt aufgetretene Finanzskandale und Zusammenbrüche namhafter Unternehmen wurde in den letzten Jahren das Vertrauen der Anleger nachhaltig gestört. Um die Glaubwürdigkeit in die veröffentlichten Finanzinformationen und in die Sicherheit der unternehmerischen Überwachungsprozesse...

This survey provides a synthetic and evaluative survey of issues in corporate financial distress and bankruptcy. This area has moved into a public domain as a result of the recent global financial crisis that witnessed failures of many venerable institutions that got rescued by the government....

The current financial crisis has given rise to calls to toughen considerably the codes of corporate governance put in place in many countries to regulate corporate behaviour (e.g. the UK Combined Code). These codes vary slightly in form but tend to contain a mix of non-discretionary regulations...

The possibility to choose between two alternative corporate governance systems (i. e. one-tier and two-tier board) was introduced in Italy by the Corporate Law Reform at the beginning of 2004. This reform, which provides for the adoption of a one- or a two-tier board for both listed and unlisted...