Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information...

Board of directors independence has been a focus for a large series of studies in finance. The overall evidence suggests that independence has no or negative effect on firm performance. Director accountability constitutes a second topic of research, in law and economics. Two distinctive models...

Busy directors have been widely criticized as being ineffective. However, we hypothesize that busy directors offer advantages for many firms. While busy directors may be less effective monitors, their experience and contacts arguably make them excellent advisors. Among IPO firms, which have...

Regulators, proxy advisors and shareholders are regularly calling for independent directors. However, at the same time, independent directors commonly engage in numerous outside activities potentially reducing their time and commitment with the particular firm. Using Tobin's Q as an...

Business corporations seek profit. That is, after subtracting cost, they maximize net revenue. Spillovers (both costs and benefits) involve trade-offs governing boards should make. Spillovers, especially when coupled with clumsy applications of discounted present value, distort a business'...

The rapidly growing literature studying the relationship between legal origin, investor protection, and finance has stimulated an important debate in academic circles. It has also generated a number of applied research projects and strong policy statements. This paper discusses the implications,...

We shed new light on the corporate governance role of institutional investors in markets where concentrated ownership and business groups are prevalent. When companies have controlling shareholders, institutional investors, as minority shareholders, can play only a limited role in corporate...

This paper investigates the effects of corporate governance factors and family ties on the pay of managing directors in a sample of Indian stock listed companies. It uses a unique seven-year firm level panel dataset and controls for firm performance and both CEO and firm specific fixed effects....

The rapidly growing literature studying the relationship between legal origin, investor protection, and finance has stimulated an important debate in academic circles. It has also generated a number of applied research projects and strong policy statements. This paper discusses the implications,...

In the bank-borrower setting, a firm's existing lender may exploit its positional advantage to extract rents from the firm in subsequent financings. Analogously, a startup's existing venture capital investors (VCs) may dilute the founder through a follow-on financing from these same VCs (an...