# Disentangling Director Attributes: Human Capital versus Social Capital of Directors
## 3 Data, Variables, and Descriptive Statistics  
Our sample is drawn from the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) listed companies covering over a sixteen-year period from 2000 to 2015. New Zealand offers an interesting setting to undertake this study because it is a smaller market with fewer directors, which allows us to hand-collect in-depth information on directors, offering a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between human capital and social capital. Our data is derived from multiple sources. Each year, we identify the directors on the boards of the listed companies primarily using the companies register of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment provided by Information Logistics Company Limited. After having identified our sample of directors, we hand-collect information on companies' directors from annual reports and appointment announcements, supplemented by web sources including LinkedIn, Bloomberg, and the National Business Review. Mergers and acquisitions data is obtained from Bloomberg. The sample includes 279 unique firms, 2432 unique directors, and 12,211 director-year observations. All variables used in the analysis are described in Appendix A. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the variables used in this study. Panel A presents the connectivity measures _DEG_, _CLO_, _BET_, and _EIG_, expressed as the percentage of the maximum possible value per year, and the factor of the four individual connectivity measures' _AGG_. These values measure a director's social capital. Overall, sample averages of _DEG_, _CLO_, _BET_, _EIG_, and _AGG_ are 0.89%, 10.15%, 0.26%, 1.25%, and 0%, respectively. Based on _DEG_, the average director is directly connected to 0.89% of the other directors. As we can observe from the table, _DEG_, _BET_, and _EIG_ all demonstrate a positive skew, indicating that a small number of highly connected directors have greatly increased the mean level of connectivity measures. This can also be seen in the p75 statistics for these three variables which are very low values or 0 for the first 75% of the sample, with the final 25% scoring markedly higher. _CLO_ demonstrates a negative skew, with disconnected or isolated directors pulling the mean closeness score below the median. We focus on the connectivity factor, _AGG_, in the analysis because we are interested in the overall connectedness of directors. Panel B presents director characteristics and human capital measures. The typical director (based on the median values) is 56 years old, has over 5 years of cumulative board experience, holds just one directorship of a publicly listed company, and is based in New Zealand. Only 15% of directors in our sample sit on multiple boards. Women account for 9% of directors; 70% of our sample has a tertiary qualification; 9% are directors of an NZX10 company; 40% are directors of an NZX50 company. Prior CEOs held 41% of the directorships, and 26% are held by current CEOs (either for public or private companies). Forty-four percent of the sample have international experience, and on average, directors have been involved with 2.13 merger and acquisition (M&A) deals. We also consider the professional experience of directors, and find that general executives are most common, followed by financial experts, and 11% are professional directors. In terms of industry experience, the average director has gained experience in 1.45 out of 10 ICB industries. Specifically, 45% of the sample have banking and finance experience, and 41% have consumer goods and services experience, while other industry experience is considerably less common. In addition to the human capital attributes above, we also control for gender (denoted as \"FEM\") and place of residence (denoted as \"NZ\") of directors. Globally, there have been efforts to increase the number of female directors ([PERSON] et al., 2009; [PERSON] et al., 2008). As such, these characteristics are important to control for in this study.