Determinants of board members' financial expertise - Essec

Very few countries require directors to be financially literate. This article investigates the determinants of boards' financial expertise using a sample of 95 non-financial French listed firms. We construct a measure of financial expertise based on educational and career background data for 943 individuals occupying 1,140 posts in our sample and explore the determinants of average per-firm financial expertise using a Tobit analysis. We find that average financial expertise is negatively associated with board type (two-tier versus one-tier) and growth opportunities and positively associated with board independence, ownership concentration, and institutional ownership. These findings are robust to sensitivity analyses. Link to the article

JEANJEAN, T. and STOLOWY, H. (2010). Determinants of board members' financial expertise. International Journal of Accounting, 44(4), pp. 378-402.

Keywords : #Financial-expertise, #board-of-directors, #supervisory-board, #corporate-governance