This study contributes to the debate on the benefits and costs of multiple directorships by investigating the impact of multiple directorships on board meeting attendance. Individuals with multiple board seats (or "busy" directors) exhibit a higher tendency to be absent from board meetings. The...

When boards hire CEOs, the board and successor CEO have an opportunity to redesign the predecessor's compensation contract. The CEO's relative bargaining power will influence the outcome of compensation negotiations. Analyzing 508 successions, we find that total compensation of successor CEOs...

To motivate managers to pursue shareholder interests, boards may design management compensation packages to reward managers for good firm performance. However, Gibbons and Murphy (1992) note that when CEOs are far from retirement, they have career concerns. In these cases, Gibbons and Murphy...

This paper investigates the impact of multiple directorships on corporate diversification. We hypothesize that multiple directorships affect the quality of managerial oversight and, thus, influence the degree of corporate diversification and firm value. The empirical evidence lends credence to...

The literature shows that insider trading activities and dividends contain information content and serve as signals to firm value. If insider return is a proxy for information asymmetry, we should expect a positive relation between dividends and insider returns. Using a sample of unambiguous...

This paper examines whether post-merger board composition affects the premiums paid to target shareholders. Using a sample of 207 stock-for-stock mergers from 1996 to 2004, we show that target merger premiums vary inversely with target director representation on the post-merger board. We also...

Using a sample of CEO turnover from 1999 to 2005, we find that CEOs become significantly more risk averse following the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SOX. Their increased risk aversion may serve as an explanation for why CEO tenure is not significantly shortened and forced CEO turnover is...

Whether equity-based compensation and equity ownership align the interests of managers with stockholders is an important question in finance. Early studies found an inverted U-shaped relation between managerial ownership and firm value, but later studies using firm fixed effects found no...

Motivated by agency theory, we explore how powerful CEOs view leverage. Because of the agency conflict, CEOs may adopt sub-optimal leverage levels that promote their own private benefits at the expense of shareholders. Using Bebchuk <italic>et al.</italic> (2011) CEO pay slice (CPS) to gauge CEO power, we find...

We explore the effects of ownership concentration on the risk-taking behavior of banks. Our analysis focuses on East Asian countries because these nations have successfully implemented the Basel standards and demonstrate a high degree of regulatory convergence. For the period from 2005 to 2009,...