Search results

This study aims to document the variation in director attendance rates around the world and investigate the influence of cross-country differences in law and infrastructure on director attendance practices.

Director attendance data are hand-collected from company annual reports and are related to differences in shareholder rights, director liability and transportation and telecommunications infrastructure across countries.

Using a hand-collected data set of 4,344 directorships from 33 countries, the results indicate that director attendance is significantly lower in emerging markets and is positively related to the extent of shareholder rights and the quality of telecommunications infrastructure.

For policymakers and shareholders, the findings of this study indicate that there is substantial variation in director attendance practices around the world. Across all markets, director attendance is higher when the telecommunications infrastructure better enables the potential for virtual attendance, thereby allowing directors to participate in meetings when they cannot be physically present. In emerging markets, director attendance is also higher where there is a stronger emphasis on shareholder rights, highlighting an avenue for improved director attendance by strengthening shareholder involvement in major corporate decisions.

The authors analyzed the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) facial masculinity and the level of corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD).

The authors conducted research for 2011–2019, covering companies listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange. This study used an ordinary least squares regression, the coarsened exact matching (CEM) and propensity score matching (PSM) procedure in testing the hypothesis.

Based on the results of analysis, it is known that CEO facial masculinity is negatively related to corporate CSR disclosure levels. However, this negative relationship can be mitigated through governance mechanisms: the audit committee.

This paper provides implications in the field of research, especially regarding the biological attributes of CEOs in relation to CSR.

As many previous studies focused on the managerial aspect of the CEO, this study focused on the biological aspect of CEO. To the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to attempt to investigate this issue in an emerging market.

Joint board management meetings bring boards of directors and top management teams together to share information and discuss company matters. The authors investigate whether these joint meetings are associated with higher agency costs or information sharing benefits in the context of firm earnings management.

Using publicly disclosed data on the frequency of joint board management meetings in Indonesian firms, the authors examine the relationship between joint board management meetings and earnings management during 2010–2017.

The authors find that more joint board management meetings are associated with lower earnings management. This is consistent with joint board management meetings providing net information sharing benefits. Additional testing indicates that the results are the strongest when firms hold more joint board management meetings than regular board meetings.

The findings suggest that in addition to holding regular board and audit committee meetings, formal meetings between boards of directors and top management teams are beneficial to shareholders by restricting opportunistic accounting choices by firm management.

How do shareholders know if corporate managers are doing their jobs? This paper aims to propose using top management team meetings as a measure of the behavior of company managers. More meetings may indicate effective effort by top management to enhance company performance. Alternatively, more meetings may reflect procrastination and decision paralysis.

Using top management team meeting data publicly disclosed by Indonesian companies during 2010–2017, this study tests for these hypothesized relationships between top management team meeting frequency and firm performance.

This study found that top management team meetings are positively related to firm performance, indicating that more meetings do represent more effective effort by top management teams. Further analysis shows that only firms that consistently hold more meetings than their peers perform better, particularly during periods of poor performance.

This study highlights top management team meetings as a valid signal of management effort and suggests there should be louder calls for disclosure of these types of executive performance metrics around the world.

This paper examines whether increased director workloads are benefiting firms or are causing directors to become too busy, resulting in lower director attendance and weaker firm performance.

This paper conducts empirical analysis of the relationships between meeting frequency, director attendance rates and firm performance using archival data from Australia.

Attendance rates for both outside and inside directors decrease as they are required to attend more meetings. The benefits firms obtain from holding additional meetings are significantly eroded by lower director attendance.

This study brings together the literatures on meeting frequency, director busyness and firm performance to show that increased director workloads are only beneficial to firms if directors do not become too busy to fulfill their obligations to shareholders.

This study investigates the relationship between companies with military directors and audit fees in Indonesia.

Using upper echelon and audit pricing theories, the authors examine military directors' roles in the demand for and supply of auditing services. The authors use Indonesia as their research setting as their military forces have a long history of involvement in business. The study sample includes 898 firm-year observations on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during 2014–2018.

The authors find a negative relationship between military connections and audit fees. This is consistent with auditors assessing lower audit risk and charging lower audit fees to companies that have leaders with military experience. The study findings are strongest where there is military experience on the board of directors and where the military experience is from the Army.

This study extends the literature on the benefits of military experience in company leadership, especially in the context of auditing research. The study findings also have implications for the selection of board candidates and auditor risk assessments.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the earnings quality of politically connected firms is affected by changes in political stability and government effectiveness in a developing country.

This study uses a sample of 2,073 firm-year observations from 349 firms listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange from 2003 to 2012 to examine how political stability and government effectiveness affect the earnings quality of politically connected firms, relative to non-politically connected firms. A two-stage model is used to address self-selection issues in the choice of firms to establish political connections.

This study finds that increased government effectiveness reduces the benefits of political connections, requiring politically connected firms to be more responsive to market pressures and resulting in higher earnings quality. However, increased political stability enhances the certainty of benefits from political connections, reducing the need for politically connected firms to respond to market pressures and resulting in lower earnings quality.

For policymakers, these results indicate that different dimensions of political and economic development can affect the incentives of firms with political connections in different ways.

This study finds that the earnings quality of politically connected firms increases as government effectiveness improves, but it decreases as the political environment becomes more stable.

This article provides a brief overview of the literature on board of director performance, highlighting the difficulties in attempting to directly measure the performance of boards of directors and how various studies have tackled this challenge. As an illustration, I show that two current measures of board of director performance, board meeting activity and director attendance, suggest that the boards of Asian firms do not compare favorably to the boards of firms from developed markets. Suggestions for future research on the performance of corporate boards are provided, as well as implications for board of director practices in Asia.