Busyness and advising at Borsa Istanbul firms

Abstract

In this study, we investigate director busyness and advising for firms quoted at Borsa Istanbul. We show that firms prefer not to appoint directors with multiple directorships and superior advising skills to monitoring positions, potentially as a result of a trade-off between the monitoring and advising functions of directors. In addition, we find that busy boards have higher advising capacity compared to non-busy boards. Also, we show that firms that have busy boards or higher advising qualities do not perform better or worse than firms that have non-busy boards or lower advising quality. Lastly, multivariate tests suggest that there is no significant relationship between board busyness or board advising quality and firm performance.

Keywords

• Busyness
• Advising
• Corporate governance
• Borsa Istanbul