Book Description

This dissertation consists of three essays focusing on corporate governance. The main goal of these studies is to contribute to a better understanding of the effectiveness of different corporate governance mechanisms. The first study explores the relationship between director expertise and performance following seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). In the short run, firms with financial experts have smaller offer discounts. The cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) following the equity issues are less negative for firms with financial, legal and joint expert directors. In the long run, expert directors continue to have a positive impact on stock price performance. In the case of firm operating performance, it seems to be better for firms with legal experts and joint experts. Overall, having financial experts and legal experts on the board seems to be significantly beneficial for firms while the results for joint expertise lack significance due to the small number of firms with joint experts. The second study focuses on identifying the most effective corporate governance attributes. This study uses a cross-sectional regression analysis to investigate which attributes have a significant effect on the market's reaction to the SEO announcements.The results show that among other corporate governance characteristics, the percentage of directors on the audit committee, board size, number of board meetings, audit committee size, average board age and average director tenure seem to be significantly related to market reaction. In the case of director expertise, market reacts more positively to SEO announcements by firms with legal experts or joint experts on their boards. The third study focuses on the impact of blockholder characteristics on earnings quality. Most of the studies in literature make the intrinsic assumption that blockholders are a homogeneous group. This study is one of the very few studies to acknowledge the heterogeneity of blockholders and attempts to understand the unexplained proportion of blockholder heterogeneity. Earnings quality is calculated using the FDD model of Lee and Masulis(2009) and it is regressed on various blockholder characteristics. The results show that earnings quality is lower for firms with market-driven and multilateral blockholders.