Can female directors help save economies and the firms on whose boards they sit? Policy makers seem to think so. Numerous countries have implemented boardroom gender policies because of business case arguments. While women may be the key to healthy economies, I argue that more research needs to...

We document that women are less represented on corporate boards in Finance and more traditional STEM industry sectors. Even after controlling for differences in firm and country characteristics, average diversity in these sectors is 24% lower than the mean. Our findings suggest that...

Public outrage over executive compensation reached an all‐time high during the financial crisis. Around the world, many argued that CEOs and boards were immoral in setting their pay and pressured governments to impose restrictions on executive pay. Using a unique sample of data on human values...

The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about bank governance. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing the relationship between board governance and performance using a sample of banking firm data that spans 34 years. We find that board independence is...

A large literature documents that women are different from men in their choices and preferences, but little is known about gender differences in the boardroom. If women must be like men to break the glass ceiling, we might expect gender differences to disappear among directors. Using a large...

The primary way in which directors obtain necessary information is by attending board meetings. Bank directors, in particular, are strongly urged to attend meetings by regulators. We investigate whether such pressure is sufficient for bank directors to have good attendance records. Using data on...

Many governance reform proposals are based on the view that boards have been too friendly to executives, for example, by awarding them excessive pay. Although boards are often on friendly terms with executives, it is less clear that they have systematically failed to function in the interests of...

We show that female directors have a significant impact on board inputs and firm outcomes. In a sample of US firms, we find that female directors have better attendance records than male directors, male directors have fewer attendance problems the more gender-diverse the board is, and women are...

We use instrumental variables methods to disentangle the effect of founder–CEOs on performance from the effect of performance on founder–CEO status. Our instruments for founder–CEO status are the proportion of the firm's founders that are dead and the number of people who founded the...

Many corporations reward their outside directors with a modest fee for each board meeting they attend. Using a large panel data set on director attendance behavior in publicly-listed firms for the period 1996–2003, we provide robust evidence that directors are less likely to have attendance...