From 1998 to 2011, U.S. firms held more cash on average (but not at the median) than similar foreign firms (foreign twins) did. The average difference in cash holdings does not increase after 2008, and it is driven by highly R&D-intensive U.S. firms. Because there are almost no similarly R&D-intensive foreign firms, mean comparisons involving these U.S. firms are not reliable. Without these U.S. firms, neither U.S. multinational firms nor purely domestic U.S. firms hold more cash than their foreign twins do. Country characteristics have negligible explanatory power for differences in cash holdings between U.S. firms and their foreign twins. Received April 17, 2014; accepted August 4, 2015 by Editor David Denis.

Abstract Financial expertise among independent directors of U.S. banks is positively associated with balance-sheet and market-based measures of risk in the run-up to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. While financial expertise is weakly associated with better performance before the crisis, it is strongly related to lower performance during the crisis. Overall, the results are consistent with independent directors with financial expertise supporting increased risk taking prior to the crisis. Despite being consistent with shareholder value maximization ex ante, these actions become detrimental during the crisis. These results are not driven by powerful chief executive officers who select independent financial experts to rubber stamp strategies that satisfy their risk appetite.

ABSTRACT Agency theories predict that the value of corporate cash holdings is less in countries with poor investor protection because of the greater ability of controlling shareholders to extract private benefits from cash holdings in such countries. Using various specifications of the valuation regressions of Fama and French (1998) , we find that the relation between cash holdings and firm value is much weaker in countries with poor investor protection than in other countries. In further support of the importance of agency theories, the relation between dividends and firm value is weaker in countries with stronger investor protection.

We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared with U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results suggest that lower country-level investor protection and other country characteristics make it suboptimal for foreign firms to invest as much in governance as U.S. firms do. Overall, we find that minority shareholders benefit from governance improvements and do so partly at the expense of controlling shareholders.

We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared with U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results suggest that lower country-level investor protection and other country characteristics make it suboptimal for foreign firms to invest as much in governance as U.S. firms do. Overall, we find that minority shareholders benefit from governance improvements and do so partly at the expense of controlling shareholders. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

In most countries, many of the largest corporations are controlled by large shareholders.We show that, under reasonable assumptions, this stylized fact implies that portfolio holdings of U.S. investors should exhibit a home bias in equilibrium.We construct an estimate of the world portfolio of shares available to investors who are not controlling shareholders.This available world portfolio differs sharply from the world market portfolio.In regressions explaining the portfolio weights of U.S. investors, the world portfolio of available shares has a positive significant coefficient but the world market portfolio has no additional explanatory power.This result holds when we control for country characteristics.