CEO duality is a contentious issue driving much debate amongst regulators and business leaders. It is also an aspect of corporate governance, to which insurance companies have made significant changes in recent years. Despite its significance, we know little about the determinants of CEO duality...

Gender diversity on corporate boards is a popular topic both in academic and in business publications, but the focus is typically on ‘how' rather than ‘why'. This paper argues that the motivation for seeking to increase the number of women on boards necessarily affects the means of achieving...

This thesis explores whether independent directors in the USA and Canada are effective in holding management accountable by: (1) analyzing how the policy of relying on independent directors developed and operates; (2) introducing the main theoretical critiques of independent directors'...

We provide the first comprehensive and robust evidence on the relationship between board independence and firm performance in China. We find that independent directors have an overall positive effect on firm operating performance in China. Our findings are robust to a battery of tests, including...

Using a large survey database on the corporate governance practices of privately held firms, we investigate why firms have boards, and how that choice, and the balance of power among the board, controlling shareholders, and minority shareholders impact the tradeoffs between control, liquidity,...

Purpose – Theory suggests that the market for corporate control, which constitutes an important external governance mechanism, may substitute for internal governance. Consistent with this notion, using a novel measure of takeover vulnerability primarily based on state legislation, we...

Conventional wisdom regards the combination of a staggered board with a dual-class capital structure as superfluous. However, the incidence of this combination in U.S. firms, identified in this Paper, is not trivial. This Paper considers a few possible motivations for this practice and reports...

There are numerous studies on the effectiveness of boards that primarily focus on legal formalities, including gender diversity, board size, remuneration, board evaluation and the role of the chairman of the board. While attempting to design a one-size-fits-all framework, scholars approaching...

This paper re-evaluates the corporate governance concept of ‘board independence' against the disappointing experiences during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Independent or outside directors had long been seen as an essential tool to improve the monitoring role of the board. Yet the crisis...

We address two aspects of board dynamics — group-think and teamwork — that both arise from increased director overlap. Overlap captures the extent of common service by board directors. Greater overlap can lead to excessive cohesiveness of the group and thus group-think, where the desire for...