We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multi-dimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent...

The literature on managerial style posits a linear relation between a CEO's past experiences and firm risk. We show that there is a non-monotonic relation between the intensity of CEOs' early-life exposure to fatal disasters and corporate risk-taking. CEOs who experience fatal disasters without...

We adopt a novel empirical approach to show that the risk attitudes of professional investors are affected by their catastrophic experiences – even for catastrophes with no economic impact on these investors or their portfolio firms. We study the portfolio risk of U.S.-based mutual funds that...

This paper studies how corporate board diversity affects disruptive innovation. We find that director boards with diverse demographic and cognitive traits are positively related to not only the quantity of disruptive and novel patents invented by their firms but also to these patents’...

The literature on managerial style posits a linear relation between a CEO's past experiences and firm risk. We show that there is a non-monotonic relation between the intensity of CEOs' early-life exposure to fatal disasters and corporate risk-taking. CEOs who experience fatal disasters without...