The new NYSE rules for corporate governance require the audit committee to discuss and review the firm’s risk assessment and hedging strategies. They also put additional requirements for the composition and the financial knowledge of the directors sitting on the board and on the audit committee. In this paper, we investigate whether these new rules as well as those set by the Sarbanes Oxley act...

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...

External network ties between CEOs and directors in major U.S. corporations may limit the e¤ectiveness of internal corporate governance. Using comprehensive biographical data on the managers and directors of S&P 1500 companies, we identify connections between directors and their …rms’CEOs through external directorships, past employment, education, and other activities (e.g. golf clubs or charit...