This paper investigates whether and how various characteristics of CEOs and corporate boards are related to the severity of corporate governance problems within firms. The latter is proxied by private benefits of control, which we measure for dual class stock firms using the voting premium...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to "managerial power" or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S. public...

This paper investigates a relationship between economic governance and the dual objectives of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs): poverty reduction and financial viability. Using an unbalanced panel of 531 MFIs the important role of other institutions such as country-level business registry...

This paper provides empirical evidence consistent with the facts that (1) social networks may strongly affect board composition and (2) social networks may be detrimental to corporate governance. Our empirical investigation relies on a unique dataset on executives and outside directors of...

In Germany, the streaming of students into an academic or nonacademic track at age 10 can be revised at later stages of secondary education. To investigate the importance of such revisions, we use administrative data on the student population in the German state of Hessen to measure the...

This paper analyzes whether immigrant families facing credit constraints adopt a family investment strategy wherein, upon arrival, an immigrant spouse invests in host country-specific human capital while the other partner works to finance the family's current consumption. Using data for West...

Based on a theoretical framework on informal, custodial and non-custodial sentencing, the paper provides econometric tests on the effectiveness of police, public prosecution and courts. Using a unique dataset covering German states for the period 19772001, a comprehensive system of criminal...

For Germany, we analyse the (relative) effects of participation in several active labour market programmes on the employment prospects of participants. First, our results show that different matching algorithms result in different severe problems of common support. Second, we obtain favourable...