Board composition and role have been under close scrutiny both in the academic and "civil" worlds. Independence has been advocated as a way to reinforce the board's power over the managers. However, the empirical literature does not find convincing results to support this view. This paper offers...

We investigate the network topology of a comprehensive data set of the world-wide population of corporate entities. In particular, we have extracted information on the boards of all companies listed in Bloomberg's archive of company profiles in October, 2015, a total of almost 100; 000 firms. We...