Motivated by agency theory, we explore how independent directors view managerial risk-taking incentives using a natural experiment. We exploit the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as an exogenous shock that raised board independence. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that independent...

We identify persistent director style effects on corporate policies. Director style explains a significant amount of cross-sectional variation in firm policy variables for financing, investment, operations, and corporate governance, among others. The results are significantly different from...

Using a large sample of Chinese firms, we examine performance differences between firms with female and male chairs and the channels through which such differences arise. After controlling for the presence of female CEOs and non-chair female directors, we find that chairwoman firms perform...

We study, for the first time, whether and how directors' and officers' (D&O) insurance affects independent directors' voting. We provide new evidence that D&O insurance through the insurance channel and the insurance-monitoring channel incentivizes independent directors to monitor. The positive...

We document an economically significant relation between director turnover and prior firm performance. This relation manifests in idiosyncratic stock returns consistent with relative performance evaluation and the monitoring of actions attributable to directors. The director turnover-performance...

This paper investigates the roles of non-CEO inside directors (NCIDs) in the new CEO-firm matching process using the context of unplanned CEO departures when immediate CEO succession planning becomes a sole board responsibility. Although critics argue that inside directors decrease the...

This paper studies how hedge fund activism reshapes board monitoring, CEO incentives and compensation. I find that activists target CEOs who have co-opted the board, have poor performance records and weak equity portfolio incentives, are less subject to relative performance evaluation (RPE) but...

Prior literature shows that choices regarding board composition are associated with earnings management. We add to this literature by examining the effects of the presence of a foreign board member on earnings management. Using a sample of 3,249 firm-year observations representing 586...

We examine the board composition and the role of outside directors in U.S. private firms. We find that compared with public firms, private firms have a higher proportion of outside directors on the boards and select their outside directors in a more responsive way to their advisory and...