When stakeholder protection is left to the voluntary initiative of managers, relations with social activists may become an effective entrenchment strategy for inefficient CEOs. We thus argue that managerial turnover and firm value are increased when explicit stakeholder protection is introduced...

If the private benefits of control are high and management owns a small equity stake, managers and workers are natural allies. There are two forces at play. First, managers effectively transform employees into a “poison pill’’ by signing generous long-term labor contracts and thereby...

We investigate the determinants of firms’ implicit employment and wage insurance to employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. We rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and between national public insurance programs to gauge...

We present a model where firms compete for scarce managerial talent ("alpha") and managers are risk-averse. When managers cannot move across firms after being hired, employers learn about their talent, allocate them efficiently to projects and provide insurance to low-quality managers. When...

We provide evidence suggesting that incumbents’ access to group deep pockets has a negative impact on entry in product markets. Relying on a unique French data set on business groups, our paper presents three major findings. First, the amount of cash holdings owned by incumbent-affiliated...

This paper analyzes the relation between CEOs monetary incentives, financial regulation and risk in banks. We present a model where banks lend to opaque entrepreneurial projects to be monitored by managers; managers are remunerated according to a pay-for-performance scheme and their effort is...

This paper uses an industry data set from the European Union, United States and Japan to investigate the degree to which banking regulation and institutional environment affects corporate finance choices. La Porta et al. (1997, 1998) have shown the influence of investor protection on financing...

We explore two main questions. First, can two markets for a company’s shares coexist and, if so, what determines the distribution of trading volume across them? For firms cross-listed in the U.S. we find that in most cases U.S. trading is a significant fraction of total volume, and tends to be...

We estimate the effect of pension reforms on households' expectations and wealth accumulation decisions. We rely on self-reported expectations to measure perceived social security benefits and to a series of pension reforms as a source of exogenous variations in pension wealth. Two parameters...

This paper offers an overview of the main interactions between corporate financing decisions and product market competition. Financial policy may affect the market game in several ways. It can make a firm more or less vulnerable to predation, commit the firm to a particular market strategy, or...