Director Ownership, Corporate Performance, and Management Turnover

Abstract

One of the goals of the corporate governance movement has been to replace the current procedurally based duty of care with an equity-based model. For such an approach to be viable, a linkage between better director management monitoring and heightened board equity ownership must be demonstrated. This Article finds such a linkage empirically. The authors report that based on an examination of a substantial number of public companies, the greater the dollar value of the outside director equity ownership: (i) the better the company?s overall performance, and (ii) the more likely in a poorly performing company that there will be a disciplinary-type CEO turnover.