Purpose – Theory suggests that the market for corporate control, which constitutes an important external governance mechanism, may substitute for internal governance. Consistent with this notion, using a novel measure of takeover vulnerability primarily based on state legislation, we...

Employing as a quasi-natural experiment an unexpected judgment by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that raised the difficulty of shareholder litigation, we explore the effect of shareholder litigation rights on board gender diversity. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that an...

We explore the role of female directors in mitigating CEO luck. CEOs are “lucky” when they receive stock option grants on days when the stock price is the lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing. Our results show that board gender diversity significantly deters the...