To understand the disruption and implications of distributed ledger technologies for financial reporting and auditing, we analyze firm misreporting, auditor monitoring and competition, and regulatory policy in a unified model. A federated blockchain for financial reporting and auditing can...

Passively managed funds have grown to become some of the largest shareholders in publicly traded companies, but there is considerable debate about the effects of this growth on corporate governance. The goal of this paper is to review the literature on the governance implications of passive fund...

Institutional investors conduct more governance research and are less likely to follow proxy advisor vote recommendations when a company's bonds comprise a larger share of their assets. These findings are driven by bond holdings, shareholder proposals, and companies where fixed-income managers...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, real-world firm managers consistently say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take firm managers...

Insiders can artificially deflect the market prices of financial instruments from their full-information or inside value' by issuing deceptive accounting reports. Incentive support for disinformational activity comes through forms of compensation that allow corporate insiders to profit...

A classic problem in public finance is the over-expenditure of local governments in expectation of a bailout from higher-level administrations. While monitoring could mitigate agency problems, it can itself be rendered ineffective if auditors are corruptible. I evaluate whether limiting...

We study the relation between product quality and worker quality using an economic model that, under certain conditions, provides a direct link between product price, product quality and work force quality. Our measures of product quality are the evolution in the detailed product price relative...

We present evidence about the ways that school superintendents add value in Israel's primary and middle schools. Superintendents are the CEOs of a cluster of schools with powers to affect the quality of schooling, and we extend the approach used in recent literature to measure teachers' value...

Using natural language processing, we identify corporate goals stated in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United States from 1955 to 2020. Corporate goals have proliferated, from less than one on average in 1955 to more than 7 in 2020. While in 1955, profit...

We study the interplay between a "one person-one vote" political system and a "one share-one vote" corporate governance regime. The political system sets Pigouvian subsidies, while corporate governance determines firm-specific public good investments. Our analysis highlights a two-way feedback...