Private equity funds invest actively. According to the literature, their portfolio companies maintain superior transparency standards and corporate governance practices, such as keeping independent board members and hiring international auditing firms. Private equity funds require either a...

This brief introduction seeks to guide the reader through the best papers presented at the Strategic Management in Latin America Conference, held in Bogota, Colombia, in January 2011. These papers develop interesting insights for business scholars and practitioners, based on the analysis of...

This paper examines the evolution of corporate boards following a large performance decline. Over 40% of the original directors depart the board during the three years following underperformance. Measures of initial CEO influence over the board such as CEO ownership are associated with smaller...

Multiple blockholder structures are a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. The theoretical literature, however, provides conflicting predictions on whether a single large blockholder or a set of dispersed smaller blockholders is better for firm value. Using U.S. data, we find a negative correlation...

This paper investigates the effects on acquisitions of creditor-director presence on corporate boards. Using a hand-collected dataset for boards of large U.S. corporations, we find that companies with creditor-directors are more likely to engage in acquisitions with attributes that are...

A central issue in corporate governance research is the extent to which “good” governance practices are universal (one size mostly fits all) or instead depend on country and firm characteristics. We report evidence that supports the second view. We first conduct a case study of Brazil, in...

This paper analyzes the characteristics of firms that declare board directors as independents, although the directors are not strictly independent, and examines the consequences in terms of performance and corporate governance outcomes. Based on publicly available information, eight criteria of...

In the bank-borrower setting, a firm's existing lender may exploit its positional advantage to extract rents from the firm in subsequent financings. Analogously, a startup's existing venture capital investors (VCs) may dilute the founder through a follow-on financing from these same VCs (an...

This study examines the effect of three measures of corporate social responsibility (CSR) — corporate governance, community and diversity on tax avoidance in firms that use auditor‐provided tax services. This is one of the first studies, to our knowledge, to empirically relate tax avoidance,...

Norway is the first, and so far the only, country to mandate a minimum fraction of female and male directors on corporate boards. We find that after a new gender balance law surprisingly stipulated that the firm must be liquidated unless at least 40% of its directors are of each gender, half the...