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  • CEOs with large networks earn more than those with small networks. An additional connection to an executive or director outside the firm increases compensation by about $17,000 on average, more so for "important" members, such as CEOs of big firms. Pay-for-connectivity is unrelated to several measures of corporate governance, evidence in favor of an efficient contracting explanation for CEO pay.

  • Firms routinely justify CEO compensation by benchmarking against companies with highly paid CEOs. We examine whether the 2006 regulatory requirement of disclosing compensation peers mitigated firms' opportunistic peer selection activities. We find that strategic peer benchmarking did not disappear after enhanced disclosure. In fact, it intensified at firms with low institutional ownership, low director ownership, low CEO ownership, busy boards, large boards, and non-intensive monitoring boards, and at firms with shareholders complaining about compensation practices. The effect is also stronger at firms with new CEOs. These findings call into question whether disclosure regulation can remedy potential problems in compensation practices.

  • Busy directors have been widely criticized as being ineffective. However, we hypothesize that busy directors offer advantages for many firms. While busy directors may be less effective monitors, their experience and contacts arguably make them excellent advisors. Among IPO firms, which have minimal experience with public markets and likely rely heavily on their directors for advising, we find busy boards to be common and to contribute positively to firm value. Moreover, these positive effects of busy boards extend to all but the most established firms. Benefits are lowest among Forbes 500 firms, which likely require more monitoring than advising.

  • We examine the rewards for experience and ability in the director labor market. We show that large acquisitions are associated with significantly higher numbers of subsequent board seats for the acquiring CEO, target CEO, and the directors. We also find that, in the case of acquisitions, experience is more important than ability. Both value-destroying and value-increasing acquisitions have significant and positive effects on a CEO's future prospects in the director labor market. In addition to increasing our understanding of the director labor market, these results suggest that the ex post settling-up incentives thought to exist in the director labor market are weak for acquisitions.

  • Empirical evidence on the relations between board independence and board decisions and firm performance is generally confounded by serious endogeneity issues. We circumvent these endogeneity problems by demonstrating the strong impact of the local director labor market on board composition. Specifically, we show that proximity to larger pools of local director talent leads to more independent boards for all but the largest quartile of S&P 1500. Using local director pools as an instrument for board independence, we document that board independence has a positive effect on firm value, operating performance, fraction of CEO incentive-based pay, and CEO turnover.

  • We analyze the effect of directors' and officers' liability insurance (D&O insurance) on the spreads charged on bank loans. We find that higher levels of D&O insurance coverage are associated with higher loan spreads and that this relation depends on loan characteristics in economically sensible ways and is attenuated by monitoring mechanisms. This association between loan spreads and D&O insurance coverage is robust to controlling for endogeneity (because both could be related to firm risk). Our evidence suggests that lenders view D&O insurance coverage as increasing credit risk (potentially via moral hazard or information asymmetry). Further analyses show that higher levels of D&O insurance coverage are associated with greater risk taking and higher probabilities of financial restatement due to aggressive financial reporting. While greater use of D&O insurance increases the cost of debt, we find some evidence that D&O insurance coverage appears to improve the value of large increases in capital expenditure for firms with better internal and external governance.

  • We analyze a unique database from a sample of real-world boardrooms — minutes of board meetings and board-committee meetings of eleven business companies for which the Israeli government holds a substantial equity interest. We use these data to evaluate the underlying assumptions and predictions of models of boards of directors. These models generally fall into two categories: “managerial models” that assume boards play a direct role in managing the firm, and “supervisory models” that assume that boards monitor top management but do not make business decisions themselves. Consistent with the supervisory models, our minutes-based data suggest that boards spend most of their time monitoring management: approximately two-thirds of the issues boards discussed were of a supervisory nature, they were presented with only a single option in 99% of the issues discussed, and they disagreed with the CEO only 2.5% of the time. Nevertheless, at times boards do play a managerial role: Boards requested to receive further information or an update for 8% of the issues discussed, and they took an initiative with respect to 8.1% of them. In 63% of the meetings, boards took at least one of these actions or did not vote in line with the CEO. Taken together our results suggest that boards can be characterized as active monitors.

Last update from database: 5/15/24, 11:01 PM (AEST)