During the decade of the 1990s the number of women serving on corporate boards increased substantially. Over this decade, we show that the likelihood of a firm adding a woman to its board in a given ...year is negatively affected by the number of woman already on the board. The probability of adding a woman is materially increased when a female director departs the board. Adding a director, therefore, is clearly not gender neutral. Although we find that women tend to serve on better performing firms, we also document insignificant abnormal returns on the announcement of a woman added to the board. Rather than the demand for women directors being performance based, our results suggest corporations responding to either internal or external calls for diversity.
Using a unique data set, we analyze board meeting attendance records of a cross‐section of trustees representing 134 US public universities. Attendance at board meetings is essential for trustees to ...fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities. We match trustee‐level data with board and university characteristics to investigate what factors influence attendance. Among our results is that free ridership occurs with larger boards. Alumni status and occupational background impact attendance records, as does the trustee selection process. No connection was found between attendance and a trustee's financial commitment to the university, nor a trustee's political leanings, as proxied by their political campaign contributions.
Although ultimate responsibility for a professional sports team lies with the owner, little is known about the repercussions of having a new owner at the helm. This article investigates ownership ...change in Major League Baseball. Estimates indicate that new owners do not impact on-field success relative to teams with continuous ownership. A temporary 8% bump in player payrolls, however, is observed in the first few years of owner transition. Change in ownership increases the odds of general manager and manager dismissals and is also more likely to trigger modifications to team logos and player uniforms.
College football players are initially assigned to teams in the National Football League (NFL) through the league's draft selection process. At each team's turn to pick, the team has the option of ...exercising the pick itself or trading it to another team. If gains from trade are exhausted, draft picks should be exercised by the team with the highest expected value. That is, the expected player contribution garnered from a given pick should not be dependent on whether the pick was traded or retained. Regression results, however, indicate that controlling for a player's draft position, when a team trades up to acquire a player, that player is more likely to have greater on-field success. This suggests that there are too few draft day trades. Plausible reasons are high transaction costs or the fear of media scrutiny that draft trades can engender.
How do firms adjust director compensation? Farrell, Kathleen A.; Friesen, Geoffrey C.; Hersch, Philip L.
Journal of corporate finance,
04/2008, Letnik:
14, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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This paper examines outside director compensation for a sample of 237 Fortune 500 firms over the 1998–2004 period. We document a trend towards fixed-value equity compensation and away from cash only ...and fixed-number equity compensation. Adjustments to director compensation are consistent with firms targeting a market level of compensation, and firms that deviate from their market wage symmetrically adjust compensation back toward the market level. We also document the relation between changes in compensation and changes in equity values, and find that upward adjustments begin sooner than downward adjustments. When equity values rise, we find virtually no immediate offset to director compensation. However, when equity values fall, fixed-number equity compensation is adjusted in the same period (by awarding more shares or options) to offset the loss of income by almost one-third. Thus, the magnitude of adjustments towards the market wage level is symmetric, but the timing is not.
College football recruits choose their schools partly for the opportunity to play for a specific coach. It is not unusual for the coach who recruited the player to leave before the end of the ...player’s career. This article investigates whether these departures affect a player’s National Football League (NFL) draft prospects. Regression results indicate that, for players drafted, a coaching change drops the average draftee’s position nearly two thirds of a round, potentially costing the player hundreds of thousands of dollars in guaranteed money. This harmful effect holds regardless of why the coach left, such as being fired or accepting a new position elsewhere.
We analyse uniformity in the market's valuation of director human capital by comparing director compensation across firms with and without director overlaps. We find that although there is less ...variation in director compensation for connected boards, which share a common director, than for unrelated boards, there remains a high variation in director compensation for directors with multiple directorships. We also find that active Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), on average, command higher total director compensation in subsequent board appointments. This result holds for appointments where the individual already holds two or more directorships and is counter to the prediction of a busy director effect. Overall, our evidence suggests that active CEOs are high-quality directors or have a high disutility of additional board work and are able to command higher compensation when added to subsequent boards.
Government fluoridation of public water systems to promote dental health has long been advocated by many health associations, based on the findings of mainstream scientific studies. Despite this, ...fluoridation remains a controversial issue. Some in the public are antithetical to the science behind fluoridation while others view it as an infringement on individual choice. Voting data from referendums in two of the six largest US cities without fluoridated water (Portland, Oregon, and Wichita, Kansas) are used to examine the factors driving voter demand for and against fluoridation. Although regression analysis reveals differences between the cities, a strong commonality is greater support for fluoride coming from voting precincts with higher concentrations of college graduates. Additionally, even though advocates often laud water fluoridation as a relatively inexpensive way to extend dental health benefits to all children (regardless of income levels), presence of children in households surprisingly does not appear to translate into voter support. Lastly, after controlling for socio-economic factors, results suggest that opposition to fluoridation does not appear to come from the political centre, but from the libertarian right and environmental left.
The proposition that customer prejudices reduce attendance at major league baseball games with black starting pitchers is re-examined. In contrast to earlier studies, no such effect is found.
It is not unusual for baseball general managers (GMs) to have network ties to their potential trading partners, either to the other teams’ GMs or to the teams themselves. This article investigates ...whether these connections affect the degree of trading activity between specific team pairs. Estimates indicate that connections between GMs and commonalities between GMs enhance trade, although in absolute terms the effects are small. However, a GM simply having a professional tie to another team does not have any statistically significant effect. On the whole, our results are consistent with those found in the socioeconomic networking literature.
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