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...

We study the effects on corporate loan rates of an unexpected change in the Italian legislation which forbade interlocking directorates between banks. Exploiting multiple firm-bank relationships to fully account for all unobserved heterogeneity, we find that prohibiting interlocks decreased the...

We present causal evidence on the e↵ect of boardroom networks on firm value and compensation policies. We exploit a ban on interlocking directorates of Italian financial and insurance companies as exogenous variation and show that firms that lose centrality in the network experience negative...