The Determinants and Effects of Board Nomination Committees w WINFRIED RUIGROK 1, *, SIMON PECK 2 , SABINA TACHEVA 1 , PEDER GREVE 1 and YAN HU 1 1 Research Institute for International Management (FIM-HSG), University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 40a, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland (*Author for correspondence, phone: +41-71- 2242453; fax: +41-71-2242447; e-mail: winfried.ruigrok@unisg.ch) 2 Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA Abstract. This article assesses the corporate governance-related antecedents of nomination committee adoption, and the impact of nomination committees’ existence and their compo- sition on board independence and board demographic diversity. We conducted a longitudinal study of board composition amongst 210 Swiss public companies from January 2001 through December 2003, a period during which the Swiss (Stock) Exchange (SWX) introduced new corporate governance-related disclosure guidelines. We find firms with nomination committees are more likely to have a higher number of independent and foreign directors, but not more likely to have a higher number of female board members. Further, the existence of nomination committees is associated with a higher degree of nationality diversity but is not related to board educational diversity. We also find that nomination committee composition matters in the nomination of independent and foreign, but not of female directors. Our results suggest that understanding different board roles and composition require a multi-theoretical approach, and that agency theory, resource-dependence theory and group effectiveness theory help to explain different aspects of board composition and effectiveness. Finally, the article discusses the concept of diversity and appropriate ways to study diversity in a boardroom context. Key words: board demographic diversity, board independence, nomination committees 1. Introduction Corporate governance codes typically encourage boards to establish nomi- nation committees for the purpose of identifying and selecting new members. Nomination committees are believed to improve the board’s effectiveness w The Editor acknowledges that Hans van Ees, Morten Huse, and Jonas Gabrielsson – convenors of the EURAM (European Academy of Management) Corporate Governance track in 2004 – acted as Co-Editors on this paper. Journal of Management Governance (2006) 10:119–148 Ó Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10997-006-0001-3