Title

Board Changes And Ceo Turnover: The Unanticipated Effects Of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Keywords

Boards of directors; CEO turnover; Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Abstract

The board independence requirements enacted in conjunction with the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) provided motivation for firms that were already compliant with the regulations to alter their board structure. We consider actual board changes made by compliant firms and how such changes affect the monitoring efficiency of the boards. We find that the majority of compliant firms (approximately 56%) add independent directors following SOX. However, we find a nontrivial number of firms (approximately 26%) actually decrease the number of independent directors to move closer to the stated 50% requirement. For firms that decrease independence, the CEO turnover performance sensitivity significantly decreases following SOX. We also find that large board independence changes seem to be most detrimental to the monitoring function of the board. Our results highlight that SOX may have had unintended consequences. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

Publication Date

4-1-2014

Publication Title

Journal of Banking and Finance

Volume

41

Issue

1

Number of Pages

97-108

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2014.01.006

Socpus ID

84893410692 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84893410692

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