Boards, and the Directors Who Sit on Them

Boards, and the Directors Who Sit on Them

Renee Adams

Series number :

Serial Number: 
515/2017

Date posted :

July 14 2017

Last revised :

July 15 2017
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Keywords

  • boards • 
  • directors • 
  • groups • 
  • Advising • 
  • Stakeholders • 
  • Banks • 
  • Gender • 
  • policy • 
  • Citations • 
  • Traits

Boards of directors are intellectually interesting; the literature on boards has academic impact, and there is substantial scope for this literature to have policy impact.

I illustrate these points by combining a select review of the literature with evidence from a variety of data sets. Boards are difficult to study—which makes them intellectually interesting. Papers on boards are cited 52.2% more per year since publication than other finance papers (controlling for year of publication and the number of papers published in the same year)—which makes them impactful. Boards are the focus of a substantial amount of policy-making—which means there is scope for the board literature to have policy impact.

Although the literature on boards has grown substantially in recent years, I highlight that many topics for future research remain. Most importantly, I argue that to understand boards we need to understand the people who sit on them.

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Authors

Professor
Real name: 
Renee Adams
Fellow, Research Member
UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales