Directors’ education and corporate liquidity: evidence from boards in Taiwan

Exploring processes in Spanish, German and UK boards: a measurement framework of board know-how, board diversity and directors’ interactions interrelation

Purpose

Several empirical attempts have investigated boardroom processes and their impact on the governing team decision-making. Such attempts, however, have derived in inchoate results opening new methodological debates and leaving the underlying patterns of board processes obscure. This paper aims to shed light on these patterns by empirically examining the interrelation among the three central constructs involved in board decision-making: know-how, demographic diversity and directors’ social interactions.

Design/methodology/approach

A framework of interrelation among know-how, demographic diversity and social interactions was conceptually built and empirically validated with partial least squares structural equation modelling applied to archival data from a sample of 87 boards of directors of Spanish, German and UK listed companies.

Findings

Results unmask the intricacies of behavioural processes involved in know-how-demography relation: demographic diversity contribution to know-how is totally and positively mediated by directors’ social interactions. This reveals the power of directors’ socialization frequency in determining processes and predicting know-how.

Practical implications

The paper offers a new pathway to manage board know-how and to make board diversity effective. It also opens a door to an innovative empirical methodology to make board processes emerge, one that overcomes methodological limitations of previous efforts.

Originality/value

This is so far the only study that examines and measures holistically the structural interrelation among the three central constructs determining board decisions and performance: know-how, diversity and social interactions.

A bibliometric analysis of cash holdings literature: current status, development, and agenda for future research

Despite the growing interest in exploring the cash holding aspects among scholars, systematic reviews and comprehensive evaluation in this area has been limited. Also, there is only a fragmented understanding about how the cash holdings concept is formed among researchers and experts. We fill this gap in the literature by identifying and evaluating the research development of cash holdings topic. Using 874 articles from the Scopus database that were published between 1947 and early 2020, bibliometric and content analyses were employed to assess the patterns of global cash holdings research. We find that previous studies have substantially enriched our knowledge of the antecedents and consequences of cash holdings. Yet, there are still several opportunities to make significant contributions in this area. The contribution of this research is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the development of cash holdings research (using a sizeable archival database). It identifies the current joint development and potential opportunities for future work directions on cash holdings association with payout policy, corporate social responsibility, and corporate governance. Our results are likely to be of interest to academics, practitioners, and educators in related business and finance fields.