Reexamining Staggered Boards and Shareholder Value

Staggered Boards and Shareholder Value: A Reply to Amihud and Stoyanov

In a paper published in the JFE in 2013, we provided evidence that market participants perceive staggered boards to be on average value-reducing. In a recent response paper, Amihud and Stoyanov (2015) “contest” our results. They advocate using alternative methods for estimating risk-adjusted returns and excluding some observations from our sample. Amihud and Stoyanov claim that making such chan...

How do staggered boards affect shareholder value? Evidence from a natural experiment

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms’ greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court rulings–separated by several weeks and going in opposite directions–that affected the antitakeover force of...

Negotiated Shareholder Value :

Negotiated Shareholder Value: The German Version of an Anglo-American Practice

Maximising Shareholder Value

Can Staggered Boards Improve Value? Evidence from the Massachusetts Natural Experiment

We study the effect of staggered boards on long-run firm value, using a natural experiment: a 1990 law that imposed a staggered board on all firms incorporated in Massachusetts. We find a significant and positive average increase in Tobin’s Q among the Massachusetts treated firms, suggesting that staggered boards can be beneficial for early-life-cycle firms, which exhibit greater information as...