This talk explores several issues connected with a change from a legal presumption of transparency to one of confidentiality of board deliberations and work product, a change which is proposed by the draft Principles of the Law of Nonprofit Organizations. In addition to presenting historical and...

I investigate firm financial management when the CFO has greater authority by being on the board and the corresponding changes when the CFO position leaves the board. After the 2002 regulatory changes on board composition requirements, determinants of CFO board membership shift from being driven...

In their 2008 paper, Dahya, Dimitrov, and McConnell find that corporate values are lower when a higher fraction of the firm’s board of directors is associated with the dominant shareholder, especially in countries with weak legal regimes. Our study presents a simple model that is consistent...

A poor ethical culture has been considered one of the reasons for the emergence of many corporate governance scandals. In this paper, I investigate the link between two corporate governance mechanisms – the composition of the board of directors and ownership structure – and ethical culture...

The paper empirically investigates the association between friendly boards and corporate financing policy. A friendly board can be defined as a board on which some directors are socially tied to the CEO. In the paper, we consider that a director is socially tied to the CEO when he belongs to the...

We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multi-dimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent...

Motivated by agency theory, we investigate the effect of board size on corporate outcomes. To address endogeneity, we exploit the variations in the director-age populations across the states in the U.S. We argue that firms with access to a larger pool of potential directors tend to have larger...

In order to capture and lead the market, a board should be able to understand and quickly react to the changing global market. The market is very complex and highly segmented according to factors such as gender, age and ethnicity. Therefore, having a diverse board is advantageous because the...

[enter Abstract Body]We use a sample of randomly selected CRSP-listed firms to explore the cross-sectional determinants of corporate board size. We find that the average number of directors on boards differs significantly across industries. Further evidence indicates that these differences are...

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the...