In this dissertation, I focus on the issue of how to improve corporate governance. In the first essay (Chapter 2) of the dissertation, I explore the notion of how managerial competition/teamwork would have an impact on firm performance. I propose that by fostering more managerial competition, we may be able to improve corporate governance because there is more information disclosed from the managers. I find that greater managerial competition arnong top management team is positively related to firm performance, especially when the firm is more opaque. On the other hand, among firms with more intangible assets where more teamwork/collaboration may be desirable, higher managerial competition is found to be detrimental to firm performance.;The second essay (Chapter 3) explores the notion that board ability matters to monitoring and firm performance, which is ignored in the previous research as we tend to focus on directors' conflicts of interest and bias problem. Instead, I argue that directors can be (perfectly) unbiased but in the mean time incapable to fulfill the monitoring role, simply because they do not have the adequate training, experience and expertise. I collect the networking ties, working experience and education background of each director for the Russell 1000 industrial firms and I find that the networking capital of the board is positively related to firm performance. The evidence may provide some implications to the policymakers that ilnstead of only focusing on board independence, maybe we also should require firms to disclose more information on their directors' expertise.;Chapter 4 explores the notion of board capital further in light of firm's operating environment and the resources it needs to cope with the monitoring difficulty as well as greater advising arising from higher corporate complexity, faster growth and greater firm opacity. I find that when firms are more complex or growing faster, greater board capital tends to add more value to the shareholders. The evidence shows that it may be desirable for us to explore both monitoring role and advising role of the board, by combining agency theory and resource-based view on board.
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