We survey the empirical literature on disproportional ownership, i.e. the use of mechanisms that separate voting rights from cash flow rights in corporations. Our focus is mostly on explicit mechanisms that allow some shareholders to acquire control with less than proportional economic interest...

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...

We develop and test the hypothesis that private information incorporated into stock prices (price informativeness) affects the structure of corporate boards. We find a negative relation between measures of price informativeness and measures of board independence. This finding is robust to the...

We show that country characteristics explain most of the cross-sectional variation in bank board independence. In contrast, country characteristics have little explanatory power for the fraction of outside bank directors with experience in the banking industry. Exploiting the time-series...