Brazilian law requires public companies to have a board of directors, with at least three members. Firms
that list on Bovespa Level 2 or Novo Mercado must have at least 5 member boards.8 In practice, most firms
have relatively small boards. As Table 5 shows, over two-thirds of responding firms have boards with 3–7
board members, with a mean (median) of 6.8 (6) members. Only five firms (6%) have more than 11
directors.
A common corporate governance concern is that boards can be too large to be effective (e.g., Yermack,
1996). In Brazil, in contrast, it seems likely that some boards are too small to be effective. The members of a
small board will have a limited range of expertise, and cannot effectively delegate some of their work to
committees. The overall work to be done by the board might simply exceed the capacity of a small group of
people.
Table 6 shows board size for different ranges of firm size. The largest firms tend to have larger boards.
However, some large firms still have quite small boards, including one firm with only 3 directors. Once we
move below the first size quartile, board size is similar regardless of firm size. T-tests for differences in
means confirm that the largest quartile firms have significantly larger boards (T-stats vs. other quartiles
from 2.64 to 3.02).
Brazil has no legal requirements for board independence. Only one-third of board members may be
company officers. But at many firms, some or all of the non-executive directors represent the controlling
family or group. In Brazil, information on director independence is not publicly available. We asked
respondents to consider a person to be an independent director if this person is not an officer or former
officer of the company and is independent of the controlling shareholder, shareholder group, or family