Fundamentals of Board Busyness and Corporate Governance

Book excerpt: This book delivers the essential concepts and theoretical perspectives of corporate governance and board busyness. It uses the unique context of a dual banking system to capture the potential effects of such aspects on corporate outcomes. Board busyness refers to a board with a substantial proportion of “busy” members who hold multiple directorships. In most cases, directors are “over-boarded,” which means that they hold an excessive number of seats across different boards. The busyness of individuals is gauged to infer their monitoring and recommending abilities through their involvement, efforts, knowledge, skills, and experience, and hence, their behaviour in financial contexts. Yet an assessment of board busyness and its effects is challenging and inconclusive concerning the two opposing arguments surrounding this board attribute: reputation and busyness. The book is the first to thoroughly discuss this up-to-date concept within the dual banking system, and it is designed to help new researchers in this field and students boost their research and academic careers.