How do you build the best board for your organization? What attributes and skills are required by law and what mix of experiences and talents will give you the best corporate governance? What are the commonly required director attributes that are a must for each board and how do you customize...

This paper examines initial public offerings (IPOs) as funding rounds for high-tech companies and exit mechanisms for investors, as well as the stringent corporate governance requirements that apply to newly listed companies in the growth stages of their development. Current investment trends...

A corporate governance model built around hierarchical structures, in which authority and empowerment flows through the board of directors to management and eventually staff, and the board is responsible to shareholders (the owners) of a company, worked well in an era of industrial capitalism,...

This paper studies the interactions between corporate law and VC exits by acquisitions, an increasingly common source of VC-related litigation. We find that transactions by VC funds under liquidity pressure are characterized by (i) a substantially lower sale price; (ii) a greater probability of...

Drawing from the literature on entrepreneurial overconfidence and M&As, we argue that founder CEO-managed firms perform worse than professional CEO-managed firms when they participate in M&A transactions. We test our predictions using a sample of acquisitions by newly listed US public firms from...

Delaware precedent, primarily Trados and ODN, holds that corporate boards of directors owe fiduciary duties to holders of corporation common stock and not to holders of preferred stock. This precedent, however, fails to address a broad range of complex but commonly occurring potential conflicts...

This paper argues that the central function of the board of directors is, and has always been, to provide assurance, and reassurance. The paper introduces a typology of four classes of board functions, legal, normative, descriptive, and utilitarian, and argues that none adequately captures the...

We document substantial variation across startups in whether and when they appoint outside directors, and the type of directors they appoint. The startup-director match depends on professional connections and individual experience profiles. Early-stage investors are more likely to serve as...

How do you build the best board for your organization? What attributes and skills are required by law and what mix of experiences and talents will give you the best corporate governance? What are the commonly required director attributes that are a must for each board and how do you customize...

We employ agency theory to argue that the effects of family (and founder) ownership vs. management will be quite different: the former is expected to contribute positively to performance, the latter is argued to erode performance. Previous studies, due to problems of multicollinearity have been...