Director Liability Protection and the Quality of Independent Directors

The authors thank the Department Editor Professor Gustavo Manso, an anonymous associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers for the many insightful suggestions that help to improve the paper. The authors also appreciate the comments from Sumit Agarwal, Vikas Agarwal, Snehal Banerjee, Ling Cen, Yongqiang Chu, Huasheng Gao, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Olivia Gu, Paul Guest, Zhiguo He, Md Miran Hossain, Shiyang Huang, Qinglu Jin, Ambrus Kecskes, Praveen Kumar, Alan Kwan, Morton Lane, Edward Lawrence, Di Li, Jing Li, TC Lin, Joseph Luo, Vinh Nguyen, Thomas Schmid, Andrew Sinclair, Neal Stoughton, Dragon Tang, Robert Thompson, Fei Xie, Rui Wang, Colin Zeng, and participants at seminars in Fanhai International School of Finance (FISF) of Fudan University, University of Hong Kong, King’s College London, Manchester University Business School, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Sungkyunkwan University (Korea), University of Science and Technology of China, University of Sydney, University of Washington, the 2018 EAA Talent Workshop, the 2019 Cardiff-Newcastle-Xiamen Universities Business Conference, the 2019 Financial Management Association (FMA) annual conference, the 2019 SFS Cavalcade Asia-Pacific Conference, the 2019 World Finance Conference (New Delhi), the 2019 China International Conference in Finance, and the 2019 China International Conference on Insurance and Risk Management for helpful comments. The authors thank Diana Knyazeva for kindly sharing the director location code, and Shijie Yang, Wentao Yao, Mandeep Singh, Lin Tang, Qingwei Wang, and a team of research assistants for their valuable assistance in data collection.