Using the full set of committee memberships for the directors of Fortune 100 firms (which I collect from annual proxy statements), I introduce a measure to capture the extent of a director's involvement in discussion and decisions that affect corporate policy. I document substantial variation in...

This study examines the effect of busy directors and boards on the value of a set of international firms from 1999-2012. We find that busy directors and boards are a global phenomenon. We discover that national culture helps to explain the cross-sectional variation in director and board...

Institutional investors pay considerable attention to the quality of a company's governance. Unfortunately, it is difficult for outside observers to reliably gauge governance quality. Oftentimes, poor governance manifests itself only after decisions have been made and their outcomes known. We...

Shareholders pay considerable attention to the choice of executive selected as the new CEO whenever a change in leadership takes place. However, without an inside look at the leading candidates to assume the CEO role, it is difficult for shareholders to tell whether the board has made the...

In this updated Closer Look, we examine the tensions between corporate culture, financial incentives, and employee conduct as illustrated by the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal. In 2016, Wells Fargo admitted that employees had opened as many as 2 million accounts without customer authorization...

We examine CEO compensation, CEO retention policies, and M&A decisions in firms where founders serve as a director with a non-founder CEO (founder-director firms). We find that founder-director firms offer a different mix of incentives to their CEOs than other firms. Pay for performance...

We examine the outside director selection process using unique data on appointments of academic directors. Overall, we find academic directors tend to be appointed by small- and mid-cap firms expanding their boards. However, we find important differences in both the factors influencing academic...

We examine the depth of the labor market for female directors following an exogenous shock to demand caused by California Senate Bill 826. Despite a surge in female appointments, new female director qualifications remain stable when benchmarked to control groups, indicating a deep labor market....

CEO succession at many companies occurs in a black box. Shareholders are not privy to boardroom discussions prior to the announcement of a CEO departure, and press releases announcing the change contain boilerplate language that does not make it clear whether the CEO stepped down voluntary or...

Information-based theories of financial intermediation focus on delegated monitoring. However, there is little evidence on how markets discipline intermediaries who fail at this function. We exploit the direct link between corporate fraud and monitoring failure and examine how a venture capital...