Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

We allow the preference of a political majority to determine boththe corporate governance structure and the division of profits betweenhuman and financial capital. In a democratic society where financialwealth is concentrated, a political majority may prefer to restraingovernance by dispersed...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612310000176"><I>Finance Research Letters</I></A>, 7(2), 127-34.<P>We argue that the recent corporate governance reform in the Netherlands provides a natural experiment to explore the impact of changes in corporate governance on financing policy. We find that, relative to a...</p></i></a>

We establish that CEOs of companies experiencing volatile industry conditions are more likely tobe dismissed. At the same time, industry risk is, controlling for various other factors, unlikelyto be directly associated with CEO compensation other than through dismissal risk. Using...

We argue in favour of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle between the stakeholders about the ultimate...

Migration has become a prominent research theme in geography and regional science and it has been approached from various methodological angles. Nonetheless, a common missing element in most migration studies is the lack of awareness of the overall network topology, which characterizes migration...

This discussion paper led to an article in the <I>Journal of Applied Econometrics</I> (2005). Vol. 20, issue 2, pages 311-323.<P> Various economic theories are available to explain the existence of credit and default cycles. There remains empirical ambiguity, however, as to whether or these cycles...</p></i>

In practice, multivariate dependencies between extreme risks are often only assessed in a pairwise way. We propose a test to detect when tail dependence is truly high-dimensional and bivariate simplifications would produce misleading results. This occurs when a significant portion of the...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A href="http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00103">'Review of Economics and Statistics'</A>, 2010, 93(3), 982-994.<P> We propose a first order bias correction term for the Gini index to reduce the bias due to grouping. The first order correction term is obtained from studying the estimator of the...</p></a>

We model 1927-1997 U.S. business failure rates using a time series approach based on unobserved components. Clear evidence is found of cyclical behavior in default rates. The cycle has a period of around 10 years. We also detect longer term movements in default probabilities and default...