The Effect of Board Structure on Firm Disclosure and Behavior: A Case Study of Korea and a Comparison of Research Designs

Bernard Black*, Woochan Kim, Julia Nasev

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

We exploit a large legal shock to the board structure of Korean firms, using a strong research design—combined difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity—to study whether this board structure change affects firm financial reporting (disclosure, MD&A length, and abnormal accruals), investment and growth (sales growth and capital expenditures), and firm value (proxied by Tobin's q). We also compare results from the annual DiD/RD design to those from simpler panel and “causal” methods, and assess how results vary across methods. We find robust evidence across methods that the shock predicts improved scores on a Disclosure Subindex, confirm prior findings of an increase in Tobin's q, and find some evidence for a drop in sales growth, but no convincing evidence of significant change for other outcomes. By comparing results across methods, we illustrate how using multiple causal designs can provide insight into and evidence of robustness not available from a single design, as well as case study evidence that panel methods, simple DiD, and its close cousin, shock-based IV, can produce apparent false positives.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)328-376
Number of pages49
JournalJournal of Empirical Legal Studies
Volume18
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2021

Funding

We thank seminar participants at LMU Munich School of Management (2020), McCombs School of Business (2012), Chicago Booth School of Business (2012), participants of the Seventh International Conference on Asia‐Pacific Financial Markets (2012), American Accounting Association annual meeting (2013), Financial Management Association annual meeting (2013), Shuping Chen, Martin Dierker, Dain Donelson, Christian Hofmann, Carsten Homburg, Zi Jia, Christian Leuz, Jim Naughton, Joshua Ronen, Thorsten Sellhorn, and Ira Yeung for comments. We also thank financial support by Korea University Business School.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • Law

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The Effect of Board Structure on Firm Disclosure and Behavior: A Case Study of Korea and a Comparison of Research Designs'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this