Can an algorithm assist firms in their hiring decisions of corporate directors? This paper proposes a method of selecting boards of directors that relies on machine learning. We develop algorithms with the goal of selecting directors that would be preferred by the shareholders of a particular...

In 2017, "The Big Three" institutional investors launched campaigns to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We estimate that their campaigns led American corporations to add at least 2.5 times as many female directors in 2019 as they had in 2016. Firms increased diversity by...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between patenting, innovation, and federal antitrust enforcement towards firms in the manufacturing sector. I examine whether the likelihood of antitrust litigation is influenced by patent histories and R&D expenditures, after...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

U.S. v. Microsoft and the related state suit filed in 1998 appear finally to have concluded. In a unanimous en banc decision issued in late June 2004, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected challenges to the remedies approved by the District Court in November 2002. The wave of follow-on...

We hand-collect and standardize information describing all 3,055 antitrust lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) between 1971 and 2018. Using restricted establishment-level microdata from the U.S. Census, we compare the economic outcomes of a non-tradable industry in states...

Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. Building on several new datasets, we argue that this decline did not reflect a popular demand for weaker enforcement or any other kind of democratic sanction. The decline was engineered by unelected regulators and judges...

We provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, micro-level data on their views regarding the...

What makes independent directors perform their monitoring duty? One possible reason is that they are worried about being sanctioned by regulators if they do not monitor sufficiently well. Using unique features of the Chinese financial market, we estimate the extent to which independent...

We develop a dynamic model of board decision-making. We show that a board could retain a policy all directors agree is worse than an available alternative. Thus, directors may retain a CEO they agree is bad--a deadlocked board leads to an entrenched CEO. We explore how to compose boards and...