We analyze the valuation effect of board industry experience and channels through which industry experience of outside directors affects firm value. Our analysis shows that firms with more experienced outside directors are valued at a premium compared to firms with less experienced outside directors. Additional analyses, including a quasi-experimental setting based on director deaths, mitigate endogeneity concerns. Further tests show that the board industry experience-firm value relation is more pronounced for firms with larger investment programs, larger cash reserves, and during crises. In contrast, it is weaker in more dynamic industries where the value of previously acquired experience is likely to be diminished. We also provide some evidence that corporate governance problems in firms, in particular entrenched CEOs, and a limited supply of industry experts prevent firms from appointing more industry experts to their boards, even though this would be value-increasing. Overall, our findings are consistent with board industry experience being a valuable corporate governance mechanism.

We investigate whether investor reactions to the announcement of a new outside director appointment significantly depend upon the director's experience in the appointing firm's industry. Our sample includes 688 outside director appointments to boards of S&P 500 companies from 2005 to 2010. We find significantly higher announcement returns upon appointments of experienced versus inexperienced directors. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we use the deaths of 200 directors holding 280 outside directorships as an identification strategy and find significantly more negative announcement returns associated with the deaths of experienced versus inexperienced directors. However, while our results are robust to accounting for time‐fixed unobservable director and firm characteristics, we still cannot completely rule out endogenous firm‐director matching driving our results.

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