This article assesses the corporate governance-related antecedents of nomination committee adoption, and the impact of nomination committees’ existence and their composition on board independence and board demographic diversity. We conducted a longitudinal study of board composition amongst 210 Swiss public companies from January 2001 through December 2003, a period during which the Swiss (Stock) Exchange (SWX) introduced new corporate governance-related disclosure guidelines. We find firms with nomination committees are more likely to have a higher number of independent and foreign directors, but not more likely to have a higher number of female board members. Further, the existence of nomination committees is associated with a higher degree of nationality diversity but is not related to board educational diversity. We also find that nomination committee composition matters in the nomination of independent and foreign, but not of female directors. Our results suggest that understanding different board roles and composition require a multi-theoretical approach, and that agency theory, resource-dependence theory and group effectiveness theory help to explain different aspects of board composition and effectiveness. Finally, the article discusses the concept of diversity and appropriate ways to study diversity in a boardroom context. Copyright Springer 2006board demographic diversity, board independence, nomination committees,

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This study examines the relationship between the turnover of high-level executives and firm performance in Taiwan. Prior studies of executive turnover focus solely on changes to a firms’ Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Board of Director (BOD) Chair, or Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This study is the first to include the role of Chief Accounting Officers (CAO) in our analysis and investigation of executive turnover and its effect on firm performance. Chief Accounting Officers of Taiwanese firms, are required to certify financial statements and provide assurance of financial reporting, a special requirement unique to Taiwan.  Additionally, our study weighs factors of family-owned business and the tenure of executives against their effect on firm performance. Our results suggest a negative association between executive turnover and accounting performance; market performance of price to book ratio (PB ratio), however, is not significantly related to various types of turnovers except the turnover of the CEO. Moreover, our findings demonstrate that longer management tenure does not lead to improvement in firm performance and may result in negative market valuations.    

Based on the statistical data from the year 1978 to 2012, cointegration test and granger causality test are used under the multivariate framework of economic growth theory in this paper. Then Granger causality relationship between residents’ information consumption and economic growth is further verified by the differential decomposition method. The conclusions are as follows. Firstly, long-term stable relationships exist among economic growth and amount of labor input, capital stock, residents’ information consumption. Secondly, the relationship between economic growth and residents’ information consumption is Granger causal. Thirdly, the promotion of resident of information consumption to economic growth is less than the promotion of the labor input and capital stock, and the shape of Chinese economic growth is still in extensive.