We examine dispersion in director characteristics within a board. Directors with different skills can augment the board's overall expertise and decision making flexibility, but they also face coordination problems. Empirically, the negative effect of dispersion on value prevails. To establish...

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....

This article reviews existing research on board diversity. What role does diversity of board members play in board governance, and how does it influence firm behavior and firm value? First, given the recent focus on board diversity among institutional investors and regulators, we present...

Recent surveys show that 24% of independent directors in Russel 3,000 firms have continuously served on their boards for fifteen years or more. Based on a sample of S&P 1500 firms over the period 1998-2012, we document strong positive effects on financial performance for firms with one, very...

We study the effect of board gender diversity on executive and director equity-linked incentives. The provision of equity incentives to executives is costly for shareholders. We argue theoretically that the optimal compensation given to executives by a board with superior monitoring ability will...

We exploit the arrival of industry-wide synergistic merger waves to identify whether classifiedboards deter takeover bids. In a stylized model, we show that when target classified boards arecostly to bidders, their negative effect on takeover likelihood is more pronounced during mergerwaves....