Ruth Simmons joined Goldman Sachs’s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown Uni

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问题     Ruth Simmons joined Goldman Sachs’s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown University. For the rest of the decade she apparently managed both roles without attracting much criticism. But by the end of 2009 Ms. Simmons was under fire for having sat on Goldman ’ s compensation committee; how could she have let those enormous bonus payouts pass unremarked? By February the next year Ms. Simmons had left the board. The position was just taking up too much time, she said.
    Outside directors are supposed to serve as helpful, yet less biased, advisers on a firm’s board. Having made their wealth and their reputations elsewhere, they presumably have enough independence to disagree with the chief executive’ s proposals. If the sky, and the share price, is falling, outside directors should be able to give advice based on having weathered their own crises.
    The researchers from Ohio University used a database that covered more than 10,000 firms and more than 64,000 different directors between 1989 and 2004. Then they simply checked which directors stayed from one proxy statement to the next. The most likely reason for departing a board was age, so the researchers concentrated on those "surprise" disappearances by directors under the age of 70. They found that after a surprise departure, the probability that the company will subsequently have to restate earnings increases by nearly 20%. The likelihood of being named in a federal class-action lawsuit also increases, and the stock is likely to perform worse. The effect tended to be larger for larger firms. Although a correlation between them leaving and subsequent bad performance at the firm is suggestive, it does not mean that such directors are always jumping off a sinking ship. Often they "trade up", leaving riskier, smaller firms for larger and more stable firms.
    But the researchers believe that outside directors have an easier time of avoiding a blow to their reputations if they leave a firm before bad news breaks, even if a review of history shows they were on the board at the time any wrongdoing occurred. Firms who want to keep their outside directors through tough times may have to create incentives. Otherwise outside directors will follow the example of Ms. Simmons, once again very popular on campus.
According to the researchers from Ohio University, after an outside director’s surprise departure, the firm is likely to

选项 A、become more stable.
B、report increased earnings.
C、do less well in the stock market.
D、perform worse in lawsuits.

答案C

解析 细节题。题干问题是外部董事突然离职后,所在公司很可能会面对什么状况。考生浏览文章第三段便可发现信号词“surprise”disappearances,以及下文中的“the stock is likely to per—form worse”便可得知C项“股市表现不佳”,与文章信息一致,因此,是正确的。A项“变得更加稳定”,与文中的信息相反;B项“申报增加的收益”,而原文中的信息是重申收益的可能性增加了,与此选项表述的意义不相符;D项“在诉讼案件中表现不佳”,曲解原文,文中提到了公司可能卷入诉讼中去,但并没有说明在诉讼案件中的表现如何,故应该排除。
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