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 nonpolitically connected independent SBs. We also control for endogeneity problem using GMM (Generalized Method of Moments) method, and the results are still consistent.