Shareholders pay considerable attention to the choice of executive selected as the new CEO whenever a change in leadership takes place. However, without an inside look at the leading candidates to assume the CEO role, it is difficult for shareholders to tell whether the board has made the...

CEO succession at many companies occurs in a black box. Shareholders are not privy to boardroom discussions prior to the announcement of a CEO departure, and press releases announcing the change contain boilerplate language that does not make it clear whether the CEO stepped down voluntary or...

In this updated Closer Look, we examine the tensions between corporate culture, financial incentives, and employee conduct as illustrated by the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal. In 2016, Wells Fargo admitted that employees had opened as many as 2 million accounts without customer authorization...

Many observers consider the most important responsibility of the board of directors its responsibility to hire and fire the CEO. To this end, an interesting situation arises when a CEO resigns and the board chooses neither an internal nor external candidate, but a current board member as...

We investigate an increasingly prevalent CEO succession strategy: recruiting CEOs from the board of directors (director-CEOs). Director-CEOs might be hired in a planned succession because they combine outsiders' new perspectives with insiders' firm-specific knowledge. Alternatively, directors...

Prior research documents how companies often rely on their own limited networks when searching for new directors. In this study, we ask the following question: How does audit committee (AC) selection differ if a machine makes audit committee (AC) appointments? Using a large dataset of potential...

Following SOX, exchanges mandated majority independent boards and defined independence such that some directors could reclassify from non-independent to independent. Because membership is unchanged, reclassifications make a board more independent legally, but not economically. I exploit the...

We examine the link between age diversity on boards of directors and corporate misconduct. We find firms with age-diverse boards to be associated with significantly less corporate misconduct – both in terms of the number of violations and the fines paid. This finding is robust to various...

In recent years, regulators have introduced gender diversity quota laws and dis-closure-based approaches to increase the representation of women on corporate boards. These developments have set off a global discussion about the importance of diversity in the boardroom and what role governments...

The banking crisis has cruelly exposed how UK banks failed to adequately defend the interests of their multiple stakeholders and has resulted in the reputation of the banking sector being severely tarnished. This proposal specifically addresses measures to help to improve corporate governance in...