We investigate the relationship between CEO centrality -- the relative importance of the CEO within the top executive team in terms of ability, contribution, or power -- and the value and behavior of public firms. Our proxy for CEO centrality is the fraction of the top-five compensation captured...

There is a long running debate over whether competition in the mutual fund industry limits the ability of investment advisors to charge fees that are disproportionate to the services they provide. We posit that disproportionately high fees are prevalent in funds with multiple share classes and...

Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear agency costs and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We show that if equity is overvalued, however, mispricing offsets agency costs...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on a number of governance and governance-related characteristics, such as board structure and committee composition, as well as the effect of those changes (if any) on both accounting...

The paper is based on building up a Matrix of concurrence – a specially devised in-strument using in details the OECD Principles, White book and the two ROSCs for Cor¬po¬rate Governance in Bulgaria. It gives an opportunity to evaluate the degree of concur¬rence of Bulgarian code to the...

We show how ownership of the firm by its customers, as well as nonprofit status, can prevent firms from using contractual terms that take advantage of consumer biases. By eliminating an outside residual claimant with control over the firm, these alternatives to investor ownership reduce the...

This paper studies intercreditor conflict arising from political interference in the bankruptcy process. The U.S. government’s intervention in the 2009 reorganizations of Chrysler and GM purportedly elevated claims of the auto union over those of the automakers’ senior creditors in violation...

Should outside blockholders be more common in countries with weaker shareholder protection? I show that there can be a U-shape dependence of the outside ownership concentration on the quality of shareholder protection. This result is in line with the recent empirical evidence questioning the...

This paper formalizes a two-step representation of accounting measurement and uses it to formalize a general rationale for conservatism as a measurement principle. A transaction's economic substance manifests itself in characteristics of the transaction, and an accounting rule is a mapping from...

We examine leverage decisions in the context of national culture over the 1996–2010 period. Cultural characteristics can explain capital structure decisions from emerging-markets cross-listings. The results show that firms from countries with high Individualism and Indulgence employ more debt....