This paper surveys the recent literature on CEO compensation. The rapid rise in CEO pay over the past 30 years has sparked an intense debate about the nature of the pay-setting process. Many view the high level of CEO compensation as the result of powerful managers setting their own pay. Others...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executivesto theories based on...

We analyze the voting behavior of a board of directors that has to approve (or reject) an investment proposal with uncertain return. We consider three types of directors: insiders, who are biased toward acceptance of the project, independent outsiders who want to maximize the firm’s profit and...

By studying the gap between the discount rates used by executives and shareholders, we assess the extent to which governance problems distort firm behavior. The estimation strategy recovers discount rates used by executives from the pattern of their actual investment spending. Our empirical work...

We consider a mean-variance general equilibrium economy where the expected returns for controlling and non-controlling shareholders are different because the former are able to divert a fraction of the profits. We find that when investor protection is poor, asset return correlation affects...

We present a model to test the null hypothesis that firms organize their corporate governancearrangements optimally given the constraints they face. Following the literature, the modelrejects the null if the conditional correlation between governance and performance issignificantly different...

In this paper we contribute to the literature on the structure of interlocking directorship networks and to the literature on the relationship between corporate governance and performance. We use a unique dataset made of corporate governance variables related to the board size and interlocking...

We analyze the optimal ownership, delegation and compensation structures when a manager is hired to run a firm and to gather information on investment projects. The initial owner has two tasks: monitoring the manager and supervising project choice. Optimality would require a large ownership...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

The paper argues that the weakest link principle, which has been widely used as a measure of ultimate owners’ control rights, has a number of serious problems. A theoretically more satisfactory method of measuring control rights, based on voting power indices, is proposed, and the different...