Zombie board: Board tenure and firm performance
We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U-shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the in...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/1728 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soa_research/article/2755/viewcontent/HUANG_et_al_2018_ZombieBoard_JAR_av.pdf |
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| Institution: | Singapore Management University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U-shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that directors’ on-the-job learning improves firm value up to a threshold, at which point entrenchment dominates and firm performance suffers. To address endogeneity concerns, we use a sample of firms in which an outside director suffered a sudden death, and find that sudden deaths that move board tenure away from (toward) the empirically observed optimum level in the cross-section are associated with negative (positive) announcement returns. The quality of corporate decisions also follows an inverted U-shaped pattern in a sample of firms affected by the death of a director. |
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