Using a large sample of European firms that mandatorily adopted IFRS, this paper assesses how firm-level governance, as proxied by board attributes, and country-level enforcement interplay in affecting financial reporting quality. Financial reporting quality is assumed to have three dimensions:...

We model the portfolio decisions by managers with career concerns in a context where ownership of the firm's stock can affect the outcome of promotion contests. In addition to their utility from wealth, such managers derive utility from the monetary and non-monetary benefits (prestige) of...

Corporate directors are liable for the corporation's actions as well as their own. Strangely, and by far, the most likely plaintiffs in a lawsuit against corporate directors are the shareholders who appointed them in the first place. As a result, directors often require protection so that their...

We examine whether risk, timing or mispricing hypotheses can explain the underperformance of private and public equity issuers, in Canada, where both categories share several common characteristics. Adding an investment risk factor to the TFPM reduces, but does not eliminate, the...

This paper studies the conditions for aggregation, portfolio separation and effective completeness of competitive allocations in general equilibrium models with incomplete markets in which agents have general preference and endowment distributions. We show that these properties are distinct....

The standard analysis of corporate governance is that shareholders vote in the ratios that firms choose, such as one-share-one-vote. But if the cost of unbundling and trading votes is sufficiently low, then shareholders vote in the ratios that they themselves choose. We document an active market...

Using a unique proprietary dataset of primary insurers and reinsurers, we analyze the structure of the reinsurance market. The dataset, which spans six years, contains the quotes for different reinsurance layers, for different clients, for different treaties, and for different lines of business....

This paper develops a two-way director-firm fixed effect model to study the relationship between independent directors' individual heterogeneity and firm operating performance, using French data. This strategy allows considering and differentiating in a unified empirical framework mechanisms...

Of the many fundamental questions left unanswered in finance, one relates to corporate risk management practices. My contention in this paper is that managerial habits and organizational inertia play an important role in the decision to purchase corporate insurance and engage in risk management...

We characterize a firm as a nexus of activities and projects with their associated cashflows. Production and operations activities and real risk management activities distribute cashflows over states of nature and time periods, leading to a transformation possibility frontier similar to a...