Abstract
This chapter discusses directors’ attributes such as social ties , reputation , geographic proximity, and expertise . The concept of independence needs to encompass social ties and connections to be effective. Directors vary according to their reputation and respond to reputation incentive s, especially when an efficient labor market for directors exists. Despite the available technologies, the geographical proximity of directors to a firm’s headquarters still provides an advantage when decisions are based on soft information . Firms often add experts to their boards. While industry expertise and specific expertise have on average a positive effect on firm value, the evidence about financial expertise is less clear. For bank s, financial expertise is associated with more risk-taking. Overall, directors are a very heterogeneous group, with diverse backgrounds, characteristics, and incentive s.
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Notes
- 1.
Kim and Lu (2018) measure executive suite dependence by the fraction of top four non-CEO executives appointed during a CEO’s tenure and the CEO’s pre-existing social ties with the appointees.
- 2.
Using Cox proportional hazard models, Fahlenbrach et al. (2017) model expected director departures, that is, departures that can be predicted by director and firm characteristics. They find that independent directors are more likely to turn over if they are of retirement age (70 years old and above), they have had attendance problems in prior years, they have recently been appointed to boards of other firms, and if they are not on the key subcommittee s of the board. They also find that independent directors are more likely to leave if the firm had poor stock and accounting performance, if uncertainty is higher, if the firm is larger, and if the CEO left during the prior year.
- 3.
Levit and Malenko (2016) also observe that distinguishing between shareholder-friendly and management-friendly directors could be difficult in strong governance environments because the latter have incentive s to be perceived as shareholder-friendly. This complicates director appointment decisions because directors try to hide their intrinsic characteristics.
- 4.
Soft information can only be acquired from personal observation and face-to-face interactions (Stein 2002).
- 5.
Field and Mkrtchyan (2017) show that, in addition to experience, the quality of directors’ prior acquisition s is also important.
- 6.
Their sample comprises 3218 firm-year observations (1031 unique firms) between 2010 and 2013.
- 7.
One of the most famous cases is probably Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google Inc. from 2001 to 2011. Schmidt served as board member of Apple Inc. from 2006 to 2009.
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Croci, E. (2018). The Characteristics of the Directors. In: The Board of Directors. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96616-8_3
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