Boards of directors

In this manuscript, I present two essays which examine the role of diversity within the corporate boardroom.
The first essay determines that board compensation practices at competing firms influence the remuneration arrangements of directors. Consistent with the observational learning perspective, directors mimic the behavior of peer firms in setting their own compensation, but that diversity, in the form of gender, race/ethnicity, education, and experience moderates this relationship. Diversity also leads to better board performance measured through its impact on excess CEO compensation and CEO turnover sensitivity.
In the second essay, I document the presence of peer influence in diversity hires. As firms within an industry hire more women and minority directors, others will do the same. This type of herding behavior has both positive and negative outcomes. Firm stock and operating performance is worse in the years after a peer-driven diversity hire, yet board performance is better. I conclude that peer-driven decisions may be suboptimal, but that diversity can promote better governance in the boardroom.

I examine whether and how racially/ethnically diverse board impacts the quality of reported earnings. Agency theory suggests that the board of directors acts as a robust governance mechanism to reduce opportunistic managerial behavior that may harm shareholders' wealth. Further, diversity coalesces a variety of attributes from different directors that are valuable in predicting organizational outcomes. The majority of extant literature focuses on gender-diverse boards and various firm outcomes, while little is known about how directors' race/ethnicity affects earnings quality.
Using a sample of firms publicly traded in the U.S., I find that increased board racial/ethnic diversity is associated with better earnings quality as proxied by lower discretionary accruals and lower probability of internal control weaknesses and financial statement restatements. I further examine whether firms with increased diversity (racial/ethnic and gender diversity) enjoy incrementally higher earnings quality than other firms. However, I fail to find support that racial/ethnic and gender intersectionality is associated with improved earnings quality. Lastly, based on critical mass theory, I test whether an industry descriptive norm is necessary for firms to enjoy increased earnings quality. I find that racial/ethnic directors have a meaningful impact on a firm's earnings quality regardless of the level of diversity; even firms with lower than the industry descriptive norm of racial/ethnic diversity enjoy improved earnings quality.

The proposed study examines the effect of CEO-board social connections on corporate policies. Motivated by the independent board view and collaborative board view, I propose two opposing hypotheses explaining the effect of CEO-board connections on corporate policies: monitoring hypothesis and advising hypothesis.
In my first essay, I validate the two competing hypotheses of CEO-board connections by investigating the effect of CEO-board connections on monitoring and advising role of the board, and firm valuation. I find that CEO-board connections have a negative effect on board monitoring and positive effect on board advising and firm valuation. The results are robust to endogeneity concerns and different model specifications. Disentangling the Channels, I also show that the predicted effect of CEO-board connections on board monitoring and advising have opposite effects on firm valuation. Lastly, I provide evidence that the effect of CEO-board connections on firm performance is stronger in firms with high growth opportunities.