Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities. This Paper surveys recent work that examines the role of trade integration between similar and dissimilar countries for these changes in corporate organization. It is shown that international...

Major technological, regulatory, and institutional changes have made finance more widely available in recent years, amounting to a bona fide ‘financial revolution’. In this article, we focus on the impact the financial revolution has had on the way firms are (or should be) organized and...

We develop a theory of firm scope in which integrating two firms into one facilitates the allocation of resources, but leads to weaker incentives for effort, compared with non-integration. Our theory makes minimal assumptions about the underlying agency problem. Moreover, the benefits and costs...

We present a novel source of disagreement grounded in decision theory: ambiguity aversion. We show that ambiguity aversion generates endogenous disagreement between a firm's insider and outside shareholders, creating a new rationale for corporate governance systems. In our paper, optimal...

This paper presents a rational expectations model of optimal executive compensation in a setting where managers are in a position to manipulate short-term stock prices, and managers' propensity to manipulate is uncertain. Stock-based incentives elicit not only productive effort, but also costly...

Mutual funds are significant blockholders in many corporations. Concerns that funds vote in a pro-management manner to garner lucrative pensions contracts led the SEC to mandate the disclosure of proxy votes. We present a model of mutual fund voting in the presence of potential business ties. We...

We shed new light on the corporate governance role of institutional investors in markets where concentrated ownership and business groups are prevalent. When companies have controlling shareholders, institutional investors, as minority shareholders, can play only a limited role in corporate...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

We develop a model of internal governance where the self-serving actions of top management are limited by the potential reaction of subordinates. We find that internal governance can mitigate agency problems and ensure firms have substantial value, even without any external governance. Internal...