3 ms·
Believe it or not you can actually look this up yourself. The impact of board size on corporate performance has been pretty thoroughly researched.
by dnomad 8y ago
Believe it or not you can actually look this up yourself. The impact of board size on corporate performance has been pretty thoroughly researched.
- icebraining 8y agoYes, it has: "One of the most consistent empirical relationships about boards of directors is that board size is negatively related to firm performance (Hermalin and Weisbach, 2003). Yermack (1996) finds a statistically significant negative relationship between board size and firm performance as measured by Tobin’s Q with a sample of 452 large U.S. industrial corporations for the period of 1984-1991. In the same study Yermack also exhibited that companies with small boards have more favorable values for financial ratios. Similarly Eisenberg, Sundgren and Wells (1998) concluded the negative relationship between firm board size and performance measured by return on assets (ROA) for a sample of 879 small private firms in Finland. In their 1998 study, Barhart and Rosenstein revealed that companies with fewer board members have superior performance compared to companies with crowded boards (...)" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321869618_The_Effect_of_Board_Size_on_Firm_Performance_Evidence_from_Turkey https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321869618_The_Effec...
- 6502nerdface 8y agoTo be fair, I wonder how well these studies control for the well known negative relationship between firm size (as measured by, e.g., market cap) and excess returns, since firm size is presumably a confounding covariate of board size.
- dnomad 8y agoIt's funny because you conveniently left out the fact that the single paper you quote finds no correlation. The point here, as stated before, is not uncritically accept nonsense about board size because it validates your ideology and to look at actual research and evidence on the topic. At some point if you want to be taken seriously (at least outside of the US) you need to do more than appeal to your ideology du jour.
- icebraining 8y ago"conveniently"? You claim there is a positive correlation. A study finding no correlation goes against your position. The point here, as stated before, is not uncritically accept nonsense about board size because it validates your ideology and to look at actual research and evidence on the topic. Physician, heal thyself.
- Karrot_Kream 8y agoRight but your reply is equally disingenuous, adding a text snippet that is for your position but against the overall conclusion of the paper. The paper is also based on data from Turkish firms.
- dnomad 8y agoThe whole thread is disingenuous, yes. The entire premise is that corporate governance is based off a dumb quote that's backed by zero evidence. The downvotes above just confirm how quickly these debates become ideological echo chambers. In America this just means people spouting neoliberal truisms like "unions will just raise wages!!1" which of course is nonsense as can be seen by the actual behavior of unions in Germany, Sweden and the auto-unions in the US. The point here is that there's no economic reason why workers in the US have such little power and are, except for the very top 1%, treated far worse than any other workers in the developed world. It is an ideological trap that has captured not just the US 1% but actually the US 99% too. This is not going to change any time soon. Given the relentless war on unions and the intense pro-corporate bias that exist at all levels of the American power structures, the obvious expectation is that US worker wages will continue to stagnate and ultimately fall in accordance with their actual economic negotiating power.
- icebraining 8y agoI don't have a position, I'm agnostic on the issue.