Using firm level data from India, we examine the impact of ownership concentration on post-M&A performance of firms. Our analysis has implications for both the M&A literature, which emphasises the role of agency conflict between managers and owners of widely held companies as a key reason for...

A firm's diversification decision is likely to be a response of two interacting effects, one is the agent problem and the other is the economies of scale. Whether diversification causes a discount or a premium depends on the interaction of the two effects. This paper re-evaluates the effect of...

To gain insights  about  the  quality  of board’s  firing  decisions,  we investigate  abnormal stock returns and operating performance around CEO-turnover announcements in a new hand- collected sample of 208 “clean” turnover events between January 1998 and June 2009. Unlike the ...

We study reputation incentives in the director labor market and find that directors with multiple directorships distribute their effort unequally based on the directorship's relative prestige. When directors experience an exogenous increase in a directorship's relative ranking, their board...

This paper empirically investigates board meeting attendance and its effects on the performance of Taiwanese listed corporations. Directors with higher qualifications attend board meetings more often by themselves. The ownership of the largest shareholder of a company also has a positive effect...

We examine the benefits and costs associated with foreign independent directors (FIDs) at U.S. corporations. We find that firms with FIDs make better cross-border acquisitions when the targets are from the home regions of FIDs. However, FIDs also display poor board meeting attendance records and...

We provide evidence on the link between busyness of CEOs and/or chairmen and the performance of family firms in India. We show that the level of CEO busyness has a negative effect on firm performance, measured by Tobin's q. That is, the frequency of the CEO attending board meetings is positively...

Regulators and governance activists are pressuring firms to abolish CEO duality (the Chief Executive Officer is also the Chairman of the Board). However, the literature provides mixed evidence on the relation between CEO duality and firm performance. Using the exogenous shock of the 1989...

We provide the first comprehensive and robust evidence on the relationship between board independence and firm performance in China. We find that independent directors have an overall positive effect on firm operating performance in China. Our findings are robust to a battery of tests, including...

This paper documents that classified boards substantially reduce the cost of debt. The evidence is not consistent with the argument that bondholders benefit from board classification because they are concerned about hostile takeovers. Instead, the results suggest that the lessened concern for...