This paper examines the effect of board composition on corporate social performance (CSP). Building on social network theory, this study hypothesizes that knowledge and experience of social practices diffuse across different firms through board members. This paper also explores the properties of...

International studies suggest that directors with political connections provide significant benefits to shareholders. Yet, whether this is the case in the political and business environment in Australia is unknown. In this study, we examine the prevalence of former politicians as non-executive...

This paper examines how companies respond to negative ESG incidents by appointing directors with experience in charitable organizations. We find that firms are more likely to make such appointments following ESG incidents, especially when these incidents attract substantial media attention or...

In 2002, U.S. stock exchanges and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act established minimum standards for director independence. An unintended consequence of these director rules was to alter firm choice of other tools for mitigating agency problems. This unintended consequence is studied on a new dataset with...

The lack of diversity across gender and race of corporate boards has been one of the most significant issues in corporate board governance in recent years. Given the critical role that shareholders have in approving director appointments, we analyze voting patterns in director elections to...

This study evaluates the effect of board composition on firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) score. We report new evidence which shows a significant and negative association between co-opted directors and the CSR score. This finding is robust to various approaches that account for...

Purpose: This study aimed to determine the relationship between the environmental, social, and governance factors (ESG) and the financial performance of mining firms within South Africa. Prior research has focussed primarily on the ESG components and lacked further investigation on the...

CEO activism — the practice of CEOs taking public positions on environmental, social, and political issues not directly related to their business — has become a hotly debated topic in corporate governance. To better understand the implications of CEO activism, we examine its prevalence, the...

This research article examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and corporate ESG disclosure variables by analyzing 10,121 publicly traded companies listed worldwide with historical ESG data available in Bloomberg from 2016 to 2020. The paper seeks to answer whether corporate...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...