About a decade ago, Taiwan introduced the institution of independent directors, which has long been advocated as a good corporate governance practice in the United States of America (“U.S.”). At the time, the concept of independent directors then was a whole new legal idea in Taiwan that...

We empirically examine the Capital Purchase Program (CPP) used by the US government to bail out distressed banks with equity infusions during the Great Recession. We find strong evidence that a feature of the CPP - the government's ability to appoint independent directors on the board of an...

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...

We study how interest alignment between CEOs and corporate boards affects investment efficiency. The model entails a CEO who encounters an investment project and decides either or not to present it for approval to a board of directors. The CEO may need to collect and report investment-relevant...

A revised version of this paper, titled "Board bias, information, and investment efficiency," is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3965147A CEO who is an empire-builder reports information about an investment opportunity ("project"). Before approving or...

The paper analyzes the optimal structure of the board of directors in a firm with ownership concentrated in the hands of a large shareholder who sits on the board. We focus our attention on the choice between a one-tier board that performs all tasks and a two-tier board where the management...