We investigate whether outside board memberships of CEOs signal expertise or entrenchment. The analysis is based on panel data of the largest German companies covering the period from 1996 to 2008. Supporting the entrenchment hypothesis, our analysis reveals that firms having a CEO with one or...

It is widely believed that the ideal board in corporations is composed almost entirely of independent (outside) directors. In contrast, this paper shows that some lack of board independence can be in the interest of shareholders. This follows because a lack of board independence serves as a...

The most important responsibility of cooperative directors is to judiciously ask the right questions of management. It has been suggested that some directors do not know all of the correct questions to ask of management, or how. The purpose of this paper is fourfold: 1) To briefly describe how...

This paper provides empirical evidence consistent with the facts that (1) social networks may strongly affect board composition and (2) social networks may be detrimental to corporate governance. Our empirical investigation relies on a unique dataset on executives and outside directors of...

We consider the current bipartite graph of German corporate boards and identify a small core of directors who are highly central in the entire network while being densely connected among themselves. To identify the core, we compare the actual number of board memberships to a random benchmark,...

In der Betriebsbefragung IAB-Betriebspanel wird in regelmäßigen Abständen die Zahl von Führungskräften auf der obersten und - soweit vorhanden - der zweiten Führungsebene sowie die Zahl der Frauen und Männer in Führungspositionen erhoben. Auf den Führungsetagen der...

This study examines how globalization of corporate governance practices influence the risk of European CEOs being dismissed. We argue that the harsh monitoring of the American corporate governance system spills over to the rest of the world as a result of this globalization. We focus on direct...