Staggered Boards and Long-Term Firm Value, Revisited
Abstract
This paper revisits the staggered board debate focusing on the long-term association of firm value withchanges in board structure. We find no evidence that staggered board changes are negatively related to firmvalue. However, we find a positive relation for firms engaged in innovation and where stakeholderrelationships matter more. This suggests that staggered boards promote value creation for some firms bycommitting the firm to undertaking long-term projects and bonding it to the relationship-specificinvestments of its stakeholders. Our results are robust to matching procedures and an exogenous change inMassachusetts’ corporate law that mandated staggered boards.
This paper has been withdrawn.