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...

As the American college student population has become more diverse, the goal of hiring a more diverse faculty has received increased attention in higher education. A signal of institutional commitment to faculty diversity often includes the hiring of an executive level chief diversity officer...

We derive conditions for when having a “busy” director on the board is harmful to shareholders and when it is beneficial. Our model allows directors to condition their monitoring choices on their co-directors' choices and to experience positive or negative monitoring synergies across firms....

This paper investigates the frequency of connections between banks and non-financial firms through board linkages and whether those connections affect lending and borrowing behavior. Although a board linkages may reduce the costs of information flows between the lender and borrower, a board...

This paper investigates what factors determine whether a commercial banker is on the board of a non-financial firm. We consider the tradeoff between the benefits of direct bank monitoring to the firm and the costs of active bank involvement in firm management. Given the different payoff...

We examine CEO-board dynamics using a new panel dataset that spans 1920 to 2011. The long sample allows us to perform within-firm and within-CEO tests over a long horizon, many for the first time in the governance literature. Consistent with theories of bargaining or dynamic contracting, we find...

Narrative records in US newspapers reveal that about 70 percent of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members who served during the last 55 years are perceived to have had persistent policy preferences over time, as either inflation-fighting hawks or growth-promoting doves. The rest are...

We develop a dynamic model of board decision-making. We show that a board could retain a policy all directors agree is worse than an available alternative. Thus, directors may retain a CEO they agree is bad—a deadlocked board leads to an entrenched CEO. We explore how to compose boards and...