Outside directors of public companies play a central role in overseeing management. Nonetheless, they have rarely incurred personal, out-of-pocket liability for failing to carry out their assigned tasks, either in the litigation-prone United States or other countries. Historically, as threats to...

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"Much has been said recently about the risky legal environment in which outside directors of public companies operate, especially in the USA, but increasingly elsewhere as well. Our research on outside director liability suggests, however, that directors' fears are largely unjustified. We...

This article focuses on the widely held views that antitakeover charter and bylaw provisions (ATPs) increase agency costs, thereby reducing firm value, but that firms going public minimize agency costs, thereby maximizing firm value. We show that these views cannot comfortably coexist: ATPs are...