Sex composition of corporate boards and corporate philanthropy

Consensus, Control and Corporate Boards∗

We investigate properties of shareholder-value maximizing corporate boards in situations where both the management and the board have expertise (or private information) relevant for the decision facing the corporation. We suppose that the board cannot directly monitor management in a way that eliminates distortions arising out of managerial agency. This creates a trade-off between improving inf...

Corporate Philanthropy, Political Influence, and Health Policy

BACKGROUND The Framework Convention of Tobacco Control (FCTC) provides a basis for nation states to limit the political effects of tobacco industry philanthropy, yet progress in this area is limited. This paper aims to integrate the findings of previous studies on tobacco industry philanthropy with a new analysis of British American Tobacco's (BAT) record of charitable giving to develop a gener...

The competitive advantage of corporate philanthropy.

When it comes to philanthropy, executives increasingly see themselves as caught between critics demanding ever higher levels of "corporate social responsibility" and investors applying pressure to maximize short-term profits. In response, many companies have sought to make their giving more strategic, but what passes for strategic philanthropy is almost never truly strategic, and often isn't pa...

Medical research oversight from the corporate governance perspective: comparing institutional review boards and corporate boards.

Expertise, Structure, and Reputation of Corporate Boards

This paper studies the implications of directors’s expertise for optimal board structure. The expertise of directors is particularly important when the company’s management does not cooperate with the board, and directors must rely on their own judgment when making decisions. The results of this paper demonstrate that even when the board acts in its shareholders’best interests, its expertise ca...