This review considers two recently published texts, Company Directors' Responsibilities to Creditors by Andrew Keay, hereafter identified as Keay's text, and Directors' Duties During Insolvency by Allens Arthur Robinson, hereafter identified as Allens' text. Where possible comparisons are drawn...

Corporations are vulnerable to the greed, self-dealing and conflicts of those in control of the corporation. Courts historically have regulated this potential abuse by designating the board of directors and senior management as fiduciaries. In some instances, however, shareholders, creditors or...

In this Article, we use hand-collected data to shed light on a troubling innovation in bankruptcy practice. We show that distressed companies, especially those controlled by private-equity sponsors, often now prepare for a Chapter 11 filing by appointing bankruptcy experts to their boards of...

This study examines the effect of board composition on the likelihood of corporate failure in the UK. We consider both independent and non-independent (grey) non-executive directors (NEDs) to enhance our understanding of the impact of NEDs' personal or economic ties with the firm and its...

The financial crisis made apparent the fact that managers and the boards of banks had failed to see the implications of irrational behavior and had ignored the risk associated with group think. Taking data from Switzerland our study shows that there is an increasing homogeneity of management and...

[enter Abstract Body]We use a sample of randomly selected CRSP-listed firms to explore the cross-sectional determinants of corporate board size. We find that the average number of directors on boards differs significantly across industries. Further evidence indicates that these differences are...

Based on the evidence after the outbreak of SARS in 2003, which is caused by the same family of viruses as COVID-19, we show that due to the “probability weighting” phenomenon, i.e., decision makers tend to overweight the probability of extreme tail events, the epidemic experience induces...

We find that the number of independent directors on corporate boards increases by approximately 24% following financial covenant violations in credit agreements. Most of these new directors have links to creditors. Firms that appoint new directors after violations are more likely to issue new...

We find that co-opted boards facilitate more erratic and arbitrary decision-making, contributing towards default risk. A one standard deviation increase in co-option increases default risk by 11% relative to normal levels. Supporting the notion that co-option makes decision-making more erratic,...

We examine how social diversity and inclusiveness in corporate boards affect corporate performance and monitoring in Sri Lanka, a country subject to decades of polarization, civil war, and even genocide. Barely a decade after the civil war, we find that board social diversity on the basis of...