We find that the presence of independent directors who are blockholders (IDBs) in firms promotes better CEO contracting and monitoring, and higher firm valuation. Using a panel of about 11,500 firm-years with a unique, hand-collected dataset on IDB-identity and a novel instrument, we find that...

Higher CEO incentives can both reduce the conflict between management and shareholders, thereby making blockholder monitoring less necessary (“substitution effect”), and increase the ability to punish recalcitrant CEOs through blockholder’s exit, thereby making blockholder monitoring more...