The question of whether the CEO should also serve as chairman of the board is one of the most hotly debated issues in the recent corporate governance discussion. While agencytheoretic arguments advocate a separation of decision and control functions, the empirical evidence focusing on U.S....

We show that a sample of 7,487 U.S. firms going public between 1975 and 2014 significantly underperforms mature firms in the first year after the IPO. Contrary to post-issue horizons of three to five years, the first-year underperformance cannot be explained by Carhart (1997) risk factor...