Skip to main content

Firms’ Rationales for CEO Duality: Evidence from a Mandatory Disclosure Regulation

The common practice of combining the roles of the CEO and chairman of the board (CEO duality) has been the topic of one of the longest debates in corporate governance. On the one side, a majority of S&P 500 firms combine the two roles. On the other side, investors and governance experts—via shareholder proposals and public campaigns—frequently pressure firms into separating the two roles, emphasizing a lack of effective managerial oversight under CEO duality. Nevertheless, most such proposals do not receive majority support, which suggests disagreement among shareholders about the value of CEO duality. Such disagreement is consistent with the inconclusive academic literature on the relation between CEO duality and firm performance (for a review, see Krause, Semadeni, and Cannella, 2014), as well as the lack of reliability of extant studies likely suffering from the non-random choice of board structures. The above discussion highlights the need for both practitioners and scholars to better understand why firms combine or separate the CEO and chairman roles.

Read more here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Corporate Governance. A Global Perspective

Philosophy of the Book Existing textbooks on corporate governance tend to have a strong focus on UK and/or US corporate governance. This focus is somewhat surprising as the UK and US corporate governance systems have features which clearly set them apart from pretty much the rest of the world. Indeed, the typical British and American stock-market listed firm is widely held (held by many shareholders) and control therefore lies with the management rather than the shareholders. In contrast, most stock-exchange listed firms from the rest of the world have a large shareholder whose control is substantial enough to have a significant influence over the firm’s affairs. Given these marked differences in ownership and control, corporate governance issues emerging in non-UK and non-US firms tend to be very different from those that may affect British and American companies. Hence, it is important for a textbook to bear in mind the diversity of ownership and control a...

Corporate Governance – Module Outline

This module is intended for advanced undergraduates in business and management, accounting, finance, or economics, and Master students. The module is delivered over a total of 24 hours of lectures with a flexible format including traditional lectures, class discussions of the end-of-chapter questions in Goergen (2018) and the multiple choice questions (see below).  AIMS OF THE MODULE This module aims to introduce you to recent developments in the theory and practice of corporate governance. The module adopts an international perspective by comparing the main corporate governance systems across the world.  LEARNING OUTCOMES OF THE MODULE On completion of the module you should be able to: Evaluate the current state of corporate governance in an international context; describe differences in corporate control and managerial power across the world; assess the potential conflicts of interests that may arise in various corporate governance environments; critically evaluate ...