Departing from previous studies, this paper investigates the impact of corporate board diversity on corporate performance and executive pay within the context of MENA countries. Our sample includes a balanced panel of 600 firm-year observations, consisting of 100 individual firms drawn from 5...

This paper examines the impact of independent director busyness on firm value in a setting that addresses a key challenge that the board of directors is an endogenously determined institution. We use the deaths of directors and CEOs as a natural experiment to generate exogenous variation in the...

This paper investigates the role of top management and board interlocks between acquirers and targets. I hypothesize that an interlock may exacerbate agency problems due to conflicting interests and lead to value-decreasing acquisition. An interlock may also serve as a conduit of information and...

We examine how CEO compensation is affected by the presence of busy and overlap directors. We find that CEOs at firms with more busy directors receive greater total pay, fixed-salary and equity-linked pay and exhibit higher pay-performance (delta) and pay-risk (vega) sensitivities. Our results...

We examine the value impact of independent directors nominated by activists (Activist IDs). Firms appointing Activist IDs experience larger value increases than firms appointing other directors, particularly when Activist IDs have private firm experience and when their nominators remain as...

Do 13D investors incentivize CEOs to increase total firm value or to increase only equity value? By using the hand-collected data of 5,775 U.S. public companies between 2006 and 2017, my paper documents evidence that these active blockholders restructure CEO compensation in a way that benefits...

We investigate how a shock to corporate demand for experienced directors (i.e., U.S. Congress’ grant of Permanent Normal Trade Relations status to China in 2000) affects U.S. firms’ board structure and board advisory role. We find that firms appoint more outside directors with China-related...