No abstract

We examine whether board demographic diversity enhances cognitive diversity (measured as director dissent in the boardroom) and monitoring. At the director level, we find that individual directors who are dissimilar relative to other board members in terms of tenure and experience are more likely to dissent. At the board level, boards composed of directors with heterogenous tenure, experience, and gender are more likely to dissent. We also find that stock market reactions to director resignation announcements are more negative for directors who have ever dissented than for other directors. Moreover, following dissent-driven proposal rejections, firms experience an improvement in value and internal governance and a decrease in risk. The results suggest that directors with diverse qualifications and skillsets and female directors enhance cognitive diversity and that this enhanced cognitive diversity helps increase firm value and monitoring effectiveness.

This paper develops a tractable multi-sector endogenous growth model with labor market friction and human capital accumulation to analyze the underlying link between economic growth and labor market institutions. The model, calibrated based on the Japanese structural transformation episodes, demonstrates that lifetime employment system has contributed to unprecedentedly rapid economic growth, by enhancing human capital accumulation and facilitating physical capital formation. The counterfactual experiment finds that had the job durations of a typical worker been 1 year (roughly one tenth of the actual average job duration) for 1960–1990 in the Japanese labor market, the non-agricultural GDP per capita in 1990 would have accounted for 71 percent of the actual values.