Outside directors and audit committees are widely considered to be central elements of good corporate governance. We use a 1999 Korean law as an exogenous shock to assess how board structure affects firm market value. The law mandates 50% outside directors and an audit committee for large public...

Prior work in emerging markets provides evidence that better corporate governance predicts higher market value, but very little evidence on the specific channels through which governance can increase value. We provide evidence, from a natural experiment in Korea, that reduced tunneling is an...

There is increasing evidence that broad measures of firm-level corporate governance predict higher share prices. However, almost all prior work relies on cross-sectional data. This work leaves open the possibility that endogeneity or omitted firm-level variables explain the observed...

We often hear that hardly anyone wants to sit on corporate boards these days, largely because they fear personal liability. Our investigation of seven representative countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States) suggests that the liability concern is...

There is increasing evidence that broad measures of firm-level corporate governance predict higher share prices. However, almost all prior work relies on cross-sectional data. This work leaves open the possibility that endogeneity or omitted firm-level variables explain the observed...

This paper contributes to a new literature on the factors that affect firms' corporate governance practices. We find that regulatory factors are highly important, largely because Korean rules impose special governance requirements on large firms (assets amp;gt; 2 trillion won). Industry factors,...

We report strong lt;igt;OLSlt;/igt; and instrumental variable evidence that an overall corporate governance index is an important and likely causal factor in explaining the market value of Korean public companies. We construct a corporate governance index (lt;igt;KCGIlt;/igt;, 0~100) for 515...