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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Relationships Matter: Directors and Revenue Performance in the Fortune 500 Network

Authors : Mark Abdollahian, Zining Yang, John Thomas

Published in: Advances in Human Factors, Business Management and Leadership

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Conventional wisdom states that relationships matter, thus interlocking directorships among corporations has spawned a vast amount of studies. Built on our previous research that discovered director interlocks are correlated with Fortune 500 ranking, this paper further explores the relationship of director interlocks and corporate revenue performance. Controlling for standard firm financial performance measures of GPM, S&P returns and number of employees, we look at various social network metrics from director interlocks, including degree, betweeness and closeness from the Fortune 500 network from 1996–2007. Here we employ a fixed effects, panel OLS model to analyze both if and how director relationships impact firm revenues. Our results indicate that director relationships are as important as traditional corporate measures and can almost double the explanatory power of Fortune 500 corporations’ revenue performance.

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Metadata
Title
Relationships Matter: Directors and Revenue Performance in the Fortune 500 Network
Authors
Mark Abdollahian
Zining Yang
John Thomas
Copyright Year
2018
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60372-8_11

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