Abstract/Summary

This thesis empirically investigates three prominent issues in the fieldof corporate governance. The first studydelves into the areaof Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The emergence and tremendous growth of socially responsible investing (SRI), along with the ambiguity which surrounds its application, make SRI-labelled funds ideal candidates for utilising “window dressing” strategies to attract assets from interested investors. Iintroduce a novel two-dimensional taxonomy of SRI funds, simultaneously based on their self-proclaimed label of SRI as well as the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) value that emanates from their actual holdings. Ifind that across the different SRI fund categories, "Greenwashers" attract the lowest amount of funds despite achieving comparable performance. ESG value exhibits a secondary stabilising effect on fund flow persistence across all funds.In the second study, I focuson the skills of directors and I examine their effect on firm performance. To that end, Iexploit arecent Regulation amendment to create a novel, hand-collected dataset of directors' skills for all SPXDD constituents over the period CDED-CDEY. Then, Iinvestigatehow these skills cluster at a board and at a director level. Results evincethat some boards have directors with more diverse skillsets. However, skill diversity does not appear to correlate with firm value. I findlimited evidence of a positive linkbetweenskill diversity andROE. Yet, boards exhibit a secondary predilection towards technological prowess. It appears that the presence of a technology-aptboardroom is positively linked with the firm'sTobin's Q.The final empirical chapter studiesthe impactof director skills on M&As. Ifind that acquirers that exhibit more commonality in theskillsets of their directors, are associated with positive and statistically significant abnormal returns. However,directors and CEOs with more (less) skills appear to be linked with worse (better) acquisition performance. Iconsider two possible explanations for this counterintuitive finding;CEO overconfidence and window-dressing. I find evidence of the latter.Firms with bad corporate governanceappear to inflate theskills of their board membersin the proxy statements that share with their shareholdersbefore the annual elections of their directors.