Does enhanced legal accountability of non-director executives improve workplace safety? We exploit an exogenous increase in executive legal accountability triggered by Delaware Supreme Court’s 2009 “Gantler ruling” to address this question. In a difference-in-differences framework, we show...

We propose that active options markets facilitate shareholder activism and improve informational efficiency, thereby enhancing corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. We find supportive evidence that options trading is positively related to firms’ CSR scores. Our identification...

We investigate how state Universal Demand statutes (UD) that lower director liability in derivative lawsuits affect recruitment and retention of outside directors. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we document improvements in outside director experience following UD adoptions,...

Using staggered adoptions of Constituency Statutes (CS laws) that authorize but not mandate managers to consider non-owner stakeholders' interests in business decisions, we find that the effect of expanding managers' discretion in considering stakeholder interests on the cost of equity depends...