Current attempts to reform financial markets presume that shareholder empowerment benefits shareholders. We investigate the wealth effects associated with the SEC's rule to facilitate director nominations by shareholders. Our results are not in line with shareholder empowerment creating value:...

Directors are not one-dimensional. We characterize their skill sets by exploiting Regulation S-K's 2009 requirement that U.S. firms must disclose the experience, qualifications, attributes or skills that led the nominating committee to choose an individual as a director. We then examine how...

We use exogenous changes in the probability that firms adopt executive ownership guidelines (EOGs) to measure the influence of board connections on the spreading of executive compensation policy. EOGs require managers to hold pre-specified equity ownership levels, and their use has increased...

This paper shows that exogenous director distraction affects board monitoring intensity and leads to a higher level of inactivity by management. We construct a firm-level director "distraction'' measure by exploiting shocks to unrelated industries in which directors have additional...