Essays on corporate governance and corporate finance

This thesis is a comprehensive study on how corporate governance structure and quality affect the corporate policies. First of all, I examine the effects of female directors on corporate debt maturity structures, using a dataset of S&P 1500 firms with 10,285 firm–year observations during 1997–2016. I find that firms with a higher ratio of female directors tend to have a larger proportion of short-maturity debt. This effect is more pronounced with female independent directors but insignificant with female inside directors. Then, I study the association between both the age of compensation committee members and the age dissimilarity between the CEO and compensation committee members and CEO compensation, using a dataset of FTSE 350 firms with 3,420 firm–year observations during 2002–2013. I find that both the age of committee members and the age dissimilarity from the CEO have negative impacts on the level of CEO total compensation and cash compensation. On the issue of how CEO’s human capital influences corporate policies, I find that CEOs with general managerial skills can account for corporate investment inefficiency. CEOs who possess general managerial skills over broad work experience (generalist CEOs) have different risk-taking incentives compared with their counterpart CEOs, whose skills are only valuable within a specific organization (specialist CEOs). They may thus overinvest when there is a lack of efficient monitoring. Finally, I study the effect of firm-level tournament incentives on the level and value of firm cash holding, using a sample of 20,993 US firm–year observations over the 1992–2014 period. This paper investigates the impact of tournament incentives of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) on the level and valuation of firm cash holdings. I document the higher propensities to keep larger cash holdings for firms with strong tournament incentives