This paper studies the turnover of board of directors members in a sample of 72 companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange during the period 1988-1996. We investigate whether board members change more frequently when company performance is poor, as the literature suggests, and whether and how...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives to financial incentives using an online real effort...

Society's demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the "psychology and economics" of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which...

The growing awareness of the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has raised the questions about how responsible behavior of firms would impact employees’ well-being. This paper investigates the link between corporate social responsibility and job satisfaction, which is a more widely...

This paper empirically investigates how Chinese executives and managers perceive and interpret corporate social responsibility (CSR), to what extent firms’ productive characteristics influence managers’ attitudes towards their CSR rating, and whether their values in favour of CSR are...

In this paper we present and test a theory of how political corruption, found in many transition and emerging market economies, affects corporate governance and productive efficiency of firms. Our model predicts that underdeveloped democratic institutions that do not punish political corruption...

This paper estimates the effects of Say-on-Pay (SoP); a policy that increases shareholder "voice" by providing shareholders with a regular vote on executive pay. We apply a regression discontinuity design to the votes on shareholder-sponsored SoP proposals. Adopting SoP leads to large increases...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone’s hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest...

On theoretical grounds, monitoring of top executives by the (supervisory) board is expected to be value relevant. The empirical evidence is ambiguous and we analyze three noncompeting explanations for this ambiguity: (i) The positive effect on firm value of board monitoring is hidden in stock...

This paper provides empirical evidence consistent with the facts that (1) social networks may strongly affect board composition and (2) social networks may be detrimental to corporate governance. Our empirical investigation relies on a unique dataset on executives and outside directors of...