Corporate governance is concerned with the resolution of collective action problems among dispersed investors and the reconciliation of conflicts of interest between various corporate claimholders. In this survey we review the theoretical and empirical research on the main mechanisms of...

In the last dozen years, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country’s laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. Much of this research has dealt with rules...

In this study, I summarize the current state of executive compensation, discuss measurement and incentive issues, document recent trends in executive pay in both U.S. and international firms, and analyze the evolution of executive pay over the past century. Most recent analyses of executive...

This paper compares the extent of common ownership in the US and the EU stock markets, with a particular focus on differences in the ap-plicable ownership transparency requirements. Most empirical research on common ownership to date has focused on US issuers, largely relying on ownership data...

We adopt a novel approach to explain why firms opt for or against CEO duality and the value implications of this choice. Exploiting the 2009 amendments to Regulation S-K, we provide unique evidence on the first-time disclosure of the reasons firms state for combining (separating) the roles of...

Boards of directors are intellectually interesting; the literature on boards has academic impact and there is substantial scope for this literature to have policy impact. I illustrate these points by combining a select review of the literature with evidence from a variety of data sets. Boards...

Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information...

Purpose – Legislators legislate, but how feasible and effective the implementation and enforcement of these laws are and how congruent with the countries characteristics, is under doubt. The paper seeks to argue that the Greek law on corporate governance (CG) had no effect on the fundamental...

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...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has...