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The M&A literature lacks coherence and consistency when explaining the role of CEO power in influencing post-acquisition firm performance in both theoretical and empirical terms. This study uses meta-analytic techniques to quantitatively synthesize and evaluate the impact of 11 CEO power constructs (CEO duality; compensation; ownership; founder CEO; acquisition experience; functional area experience; outside directorship; elite education; CEO celebrity; age; and tenure) on acquiring firms’ post-acquisition performance. Results of 85 independent studies show that CEO ownership, functional area experience, and tenure are significantly positive predictors for better acquisition performance. At the same time, CEO duality and CEO elite education are significantly negative predictors of different measures of acquisition performance. These findings indicate the importance of integrating different theories to enhance our understanding of the nature of strategic leadership in acquisition performance.

This study investigates the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on performance related turnover. Our results indicate that smaller boards and institutional block holders are positively related to the likelihood of performance related turnover. CEOs that also hold the position of the chairman of the board or belong to a founding family face lower likelihood of turnover. CEO stock ownership is negatively related to turnover and CEOs who own 3 percent or more of their company stock face a significantly lower likelihood of performance related turnover. Moreover, protection from external control market has no effect either on the likelihood of turnover.

Many argue that the design of compensation contracts for public company chief executive officers (CEOs) is often not guided by a goal of value maximization. Yet, there is limited direct empirical evidence on the negative consequences of the proposed inefficient contracting between shareholders and CEOs. Using data on CEO bonus contracts of the S&P 500 firms, we investigate potential firm performance implications of the use of qualitative criteria such as leadership and mentoring in those contracts. We maintain that unlike quantitative criteria, qualitative criteria are difficult to define and measure on an objective basis, possibly resulting in an inefficient and biased incentive structure. Twenty-five percent of the sample observations have CEO bonus contracts that include a qualitative criterion for bonus payment determination. Our results show that employee productivity, asset productivity, capital expenditures, and future abnormal stock returns are lower for firms that use a qualitative criterion in CEO bonus contracts than those that do not. Further, contrary to the argument in prior literature that earnings management decreases with the use of subjective performance indicators in incentive contracts, we find that income-increasing accruals are actually higher when the CEO bonus contract includes a qualitative criterion. We recommend that compensation committees set concrete, measurable performance goals for CEOs, providing CEOs with better guidance and helping improve their corporate decision making.

To explore the importance of the board of director nomination process (that is, who nominates a given director for a position on the firm’s board) for the voting outcomes, disciplining of management, and overall monitoring quality of the board of directors.

We exploit a recent regulation passed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requiring disclosure of the board nomination process. In particular, we focus on firms’ use of executive search firms versus allowing internal members (often simply the CEO) to nominate new directors to serve on the board of directors.

We show that companies that use search firms to find board members pay their CEOs significantly higher salaries and significantly higher total compensations. Further, companies with search firm-identified independent directors are significantly less likely to fire their CEOs following negative performance. In addition, companies with search firm-identified independent directors are significantly more likely to engage in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and see abnormally low returns from this M&A activity. We instrument the endogenous choice of using an executive search through the varying geographic distance of companies to executive search firms. Using this instrumental variable framework, we show search firm-identified independent directors’ negative impact on firm performance, consistent with firm behavior and governance consequences we document.

Given the recent law passage, we are the first to directly analyze the nomination process, and show a surprisingly large predictive effect of seemingly arm’s-length nominations. This has clear implications for thinking carefully through how independence is defined in the director nomination process.

The global economy has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has placed greater responsibility on companies to fulfill their obligations to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) amid the crisis. This chapter investigates the role of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) attributes in improving a firm's CSR in the emerging economy of Jordan and how the COVID-19 pandemic modifies this relationship. Using a Jordanian sample of 655 firm-year observations during the 2014–2021 period, the research results show that older CEOs, well-educated CEOs, CEOs' remuneration, and CEOs' ownership positively correlate with CSR reporting. However, long-tenured CEOs are associated with lower CSR initiatives. The subsample analysis findings also validate the significance of CEO attributes in improving CSR practice during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the prepandemic period. These findings are beneficial for the regulatory setters to understand better whether CEO attributes are linked to engagement in CSR-related information. This research is among the limited number of studies that have explored how CEO attributes impact CSR reporting for the stakeholder's welfare. Moreover, it uniquely concentrated on contrasting the findings before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This international empirical study analyses the relation between board transparency, CEO monitoring policy and financial performance.

The chapter reviews existing research on merger and acquisition (M&A) activities and chief executive officers (CEOs) in organizations. The study provides insights into the existing literature and proposes avenues for future research on M&A activities and CEOs. The present study adopts bibliometric analysis on 319 articles identified from the literature. The articles selected for analysis are extracted from the Scopus database and are selected based on the focus of the papers on M&A activities and CEOs. Existing studies on M&A activities and CEOs demonstrate that CEOs affect M&A activities, CEOs affect the performance of M&A activities, and M&A activities also influence the role of CEOs in M&A activities. We identify and list scientific mapping in trending topics, scientific production, citation analysis, prominent authors, and their affiliations. The study is relevant to academicians, practitioners, and policymakers interested in corporate finance, especially in the areas overlapping CEO attributes and M&A activities.

We consider conditions under which firms hire an intermediary advisor in acquisition deals. Although acquirers pay large advisory fees to investment banks for their assistance in acquisitions, we know little about the conditions under which acquirers form a relationship with an investment bank for an acquisition deal. Specifically, we examine the role of overall acquisition experience, acquisition experience specific to the target’s industry, prior relationship-specific experience, and deal size in relationship formation and continuation. We test their hypotheses using a dataset of US-based acquirers and targets between 1991 and 2015. Our findings provide nuanced insights into the role of acquisition experience for acquirer–investment bank pairing up on acquisition deals.

Building on economic and psychological ownership theories, this study investigates whether group incentives can reduce shirking because these practices enable employees to feel psychological ownership that motivates them to prevent their own and coworkers shirking in a collective work setting. We analyzed a sample of 38,475 employees in eight companies that participated in the survey administered by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in 2005. Our findings reveal that (1) short-term-oriented group incentives (STOGIs) and long-term-oriented group incentives (LTOGIs) are positively related to self-shirking regulation and coworker-shirking intervention; (2) STOGIs have stronger relationships with these anti-shirking outcomes than LTOGIs; and (3) the interaction between LTOGIs and formal training is positively related to these anti-shirking outcomes. Although some scholars are concerned about the free rider problem in the collective working and rewarding structure, our work demonstrates how and why employee shirking may be mitigated in such settings.