This paper studies how directors' reputational concerns affect board structure, corporate governance, and firm value. In our setting, directors affect their firms' governance, and governance, in turn, affects firms' demand for new directors. Whether the labor market rewards a...

Executive compensation serves as a metric by which investors measure the quality of a firm's governance. In this paper, I explore how the signaling role of executive compensation impacts the compensation decisions of boards. I show that reputational concerns often cause boards to adopt pay...

Our model shows that it is optimal for shareholders to choose boards of directors whose preferences do not align with those of the shareholders. Such a board composition works as the shareholders' commitment to providing an incentive for risk-averse CEOs