We examine the benefits and costs associated with foreign independent directors (FIDs) at U.S. corporations. We find that firms with FIDs make better cross-border acquisitions when the targets are from the home regions of FIDs. However, FIDs also...Read more
Boardroom diversity policies link societal and corporate governance objectives. To understand whether they can meet both objectives, we argue one must understand why female directors are relatively underrepresented. We document that boardroom...Read more
This paper studies the two potentially contrasting effects on IPO pricing and post-IPO operating performance of family ties as well as social ties the top management has with board members. While family ties may solve manager-owner conflicts of...Read more
We study reputation incentives in the director labor market and find that directors with multiple directorships distribute their effort unequally according to the directorship's relative prestige. When directors experience an exogenous increase...Read more
In this paper, we first shed light on the factors that underlie the differences between the ?shareholder wealth maximization? and the ?long-term commitment? models of corporate governance. By introducing a third type of governance model, we show...Read more
Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to...Read more
We analyze how 14,000 US top executives exercise their stock options. Factors suggested by existing theories have low or moderate explanatory power. Variables that model executives’ motive to diversify fare particularly poorly, whereas variables...Read more
Following surprise independent director departures, affected firms have worse stock and
operating performance, are more likely to restate earnings, face shareholder litigation,
suffer from an extreme negative return event, and make...Read more
