Rising shareholder activism following poor corporate performance and a subsequent drop in shareholder value at many major U.S. corporations has rekindled interest in duality and corporate governance. Despite limited empirical evidence, duality (chairman of the board and CEO are the same...

This paper tests the mimicking propositions from signalling theory as they relate to stated firm objectives and firm performance. We classify the corporate objectives of a large sample of firms and evaluate firm performance relative to these objectives. We find that poorly performing firms more...