This paper surveys the economic literature on boards of directors. Although a legal requirement for many organizations, boards are also an endogenously determined governance mechanism for addressing agency problems inherent to many organizations. Formal theory on boards of directors has been...

This paper studies the governance of a sample of California hospitals. We document a number of empirical relations about hospital governance: The composition of the board of directors varies systematically across ownership types; poor performance and low levels of uncompensated care increase...

This paper surveys the economic literature on boards of directors. Although a legal requirement for many organizations, boards are also an endogenously determined governance mechanism for addressing agency problems inherent to many organizations. Formal theory on boards of directors has been...