If board voting membership for stakeholders is inefficient and thus likely to be unfeasible, as Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) posits, How can Ben & Jerry's (B&J's) be accounted for? This question, overlooked by TCE scholars and stakeholder advocates alike, is answered in this paper....

What are the costs and benefits of retaining the former CEO on the board? Corporate boards frequently debate this question as part of the CEO succession process. Like many governance issues, empirical evidence indicates that a number of factors are involved in and may drive this on-going...

While the United States made history this year with Kamala Harris becoming the first woman, Black, and Asian Vice President, the country overall has been rapidly losing its status as a global power founded on democratic principles. This is in part due to the leadership’s active involvement in...

Does the composition of governance affect firm outcomes? We exploit the timings and thresholds of a gender quota in boards of directors and supervisory boards to causally determine the impact of a change in leadership on performance. Using a novel design and data on boards, we find that firms...

This study analyzes the choice to interlock between two competing companies when their privately known marginal costs are correlated. The two rivals are organized into different business models: one delegates its production to a subcontractor, while the other is vertically integrated and carries...

Previous research on firm performance does not adequately account for the interrelatedness of a firm's professional connections, political ties, and family business-group affiliation. Many widely-cited findings may therefore be subject to confounding bias. To address this problem, we adopt a...

In this Closer Look, we examine the roles that leadership and culture play in contributing to chronic misbehavior and the manner in which it takes root in an organization. We use the example of Uber Technologies. Between 2012 and 2017, Uber Technologies faced a series of governance challenges...

The hallmark of good corporate governance is an independent board of directors to oversee management. However, it is not clear that independent directors receive the information they need to make fully informed decisions on all key matters. Partly, this is due to an information gap, whereby...

Companies are required to have a reliable system of corporate governance in place at the time of IPO in order to protect the interests of public company investors and stakeholders. Yet, relatively little is known about the process by which they implement one. This Closer Look, based on detailed...

In recent years, regulators have introduced gender diversity quota laws and dis-closure-based approaches to increase the representation of women on corporate boards. These developments have set off a global discussion about the importance of diversity in the boardroom and what role governments...