The value of political independent supervisory boards: Evidence from Indonesian dual board setting

Abstract

We investigate whether political independent supervisory boards (political I-SBs) help companies to reduce their corporate risks in the setting of Indonesian two-tier board system. This study is different from other studies in several ways. First, while most prior studies examine the effectiveness of independent boards in one-tier board setting, we use dual board system. This system promotes the strategic role of political I-SBs. Second, we use two measures of corporate risks: operating and market risks. Based on 1,176 firm-year observations for operating risk analysis and 1,254 firm-year observations for market risk analysis, we find that firms with political I-SBs have lower operating and market risks than firms with non- politically connected independent SBs. We also control for endogeneity problem using GMM (Generalized Method of Moments) method, and the results are still consistent.

Keywords

• political i-sbs
• corporate risks
• two-tier board system