Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information...

Recent research finds that firms characterized by high corporate transparency have a greater proportion of independent directors. The direction of the causality of this relation, however, is unclear. One branch of the governance literature takes corporate transparency as fixed and shows that the...

Prior research has examined the firm-level performance implications of “busy” boards. Firm-level analysis, however, masks important heterogeneity in the time constraints and expertise of individual busy directors. We develop and validate shareholder voting as a proxy for shareholders'...