Optimal board independence with gray independent directors

Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of "Independent" Directors

W provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, microlevel data on their views regarding the firm prior to being appointed to the board: sell-side analysts who are subsequently appointed to the boar...

Working successfully with your board of directors.

Internal Audit, Board of Directors and Financial Reporting Quality

High-quality internal audit is expected to lead to high-quality financial reporting. High-quality financial reporting expresses itself in earning quality. Earning quality has been playing a key role in capital market for a long time. Finance users pay special attention to earning quality because they make their decision based on it. On the other hand, the market economy will experience awful, i...

Board Independence and Competence

This paper analyzes board independence and competence as distinct, but inextricably linked aspects of board effectiveness. Competent directors add shareholder value because they have better information about the quality of projects. While a CEO cares about shareholder value, he also wants his board to behave loyally to him by agreeing to projects that give him private benefits. Because many asp...

The Swiss Board Directors Network in 2009

We study the networks formed by the directors of the most important Swiss boards and the boards themselves for the year 2009. The networks are obtained by projection from the original bipartite graph. We highlight a number of important statistical features of those networks such as degree distribution, weight distribution, and several centrality measures as well as their interrelationships. Whi...