While the fraction of independent directors has been widely used as a proxy for monitoring effectiveness of the board, there are no clear-cut measures that capture the advising effectiveness of the board. We develop and validate two new measures of board advising: (i) per-outside-director...

Public companies are besieged with requests to add women to their boards. Corporate directors are trained to listen carefully and advised to evaluate evidence. Most would welcome reasonable requests to advance gender diversity to their boards. Many, however, are frustrated by the sheer volume...

Corporate and securities law tools are increasingly being used to address climate change. Disclosure of climate-related business risks and shareholder proposals and engagement have grown in the United States and globally, as have broader efforts to use these tools to address environmental and...

In recent years, Japan has been working on corporate governance reforms, focusing on the roles of outside/independent directors. Among others, the 2014 Reform of the Companies Act and the 2015 Japanese Corporate Governance Code introduced “comply or explain” rules regarding appointment of...

Corporate boards of directors mediate the agency costs between the corporation's managers and shareholders. For boards to do this well, they must include the right people. At present, most believe that the best kind of director is an independent director. Indeed, it is important that boards have...

The push for gender diversity on public companies' boards has been gaining traction. Advocacy groups, institutional investors, regulators and companies themselves have all recognized the need for more diverse boards. However, gender parity is still absent from most public companies' boards, and...

There is considerable interest in increasing the representation of women on the boards of publicly traded corporations. Currently, only 17 percent of independent directors in the United States are women. In this Closer Look, we examine the pathways that women took to become the first female...

The number of women on boards of public companies in the United States and Canada is still staggeringly low despite the fact that both of these jurisdictions have implemented disclosure-based regulation relating to board diversity. Typically, arguments in support of regulation aimed at...

What role do corporate boards play in compliance? Compliance programs are internal enforcement programs, whereby firms train, monitor and discipline employees with respect to applicable laws and regulations. Corporate enforcement and compliance failures could not be more high-profile, and have...

Concept of corporate board was incepted in Indian soil by the Englishmen. Present days Indian corporate board has found much of it's antecedents from of Anglo-Indian company act. The initial days of company act in India witnessed replicating effect of English company act. These years witnessed...