We investigate how the contractibility of actions affecting the value of an asset affects asset ownership. We examine this by testing how on-board computer (OBC) adoption affects truck ownership. We develop and test the proposition that adoption should lead to less ownership by drivers,...

Using an index which increases as a firm adopts more governance attributes, we find that 12.7% of foreign firms have a higher index than matching U.S. firms. The best predictor for whether a foreign firm adopts more governance attributes than a comparable U.S. firm is whether the firm comes from...

We compare the governance of foreign firms to the governance of similar U.S. firms. Using an index of firm governance attributes, we find that, on average, foreign firms have worse governance than matching U.S. firms. Roughly 8% of foreign firms have better governance than comparable U.S. firms....

Legal records indicate that conflicts of interest -- that is, situations in which officers and directors were in a position to benefit themselves at the expense of minority shareholders -- were endemic to corporations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century U.S. Yet investors...

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider's cash flow rights and voting rights with firm value,...

In this paper, we review the literature on private benefits and cross-listings in the United States. We first discuss the alternative approaches used to measure private benefits. We survey recent evidence documenting cross-country differences in the levels of private benefits obtained by...

This paper estimates the effects of several American law firms' international networks of offices on the total value of overseas mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by US corporations. Nowadays many nations can review proposed mergers and US law firms help clients overcome such regulatory hurdles,...

The U.S. corporate governance system has recently been heavily criticized, largely as a result of failures at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and some other prominent companies. Those failures and criticisms, in turn, have served as catalysts for legislative change (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) and...