This paper discusses the literature on the enforcement of incomplete contracts. It compares legal enforcement to enforcement via relationships and reputations. A number of mechanisms, such as the repeat purchase mechanism (Klein and Leffler (1981)) and efficiency wages (Shapiro and Stiglitz...

Court delays are a frequent concern, yet what explains court case duration remains incompletely understood. We study the time to court case resolution by drawing on a detailed case-level dataset of civil suits filed at a major Belgian court. We utilize the competing risks regression framework to...

We investigate entry in a dynastic entrepreneurship (overlapping generations) environment created by employee spinoffs. Without finance constraints, enforcement of non-compete agreements unambiguously improves social welfare outcomes, and even increases the rate of spinoffs from original firms....

Producers or consumers faced with an increase in taxes are usually able to shift parts of it to other levels in the value chain. We examine who is actually bearing the burden of increased energy taxes in the EU-area - consumers or exporters. Traditional tax incidence theory presumes spot...

We decompose the market-to-book ratio into two additive components: a conservatism correction factor and a future-to-book ratio. The conservatism correction factor exceeds the benchmark value of one whenever the accounting for past transactions has been subject to an (unconditional) conservatism...

This paper introduces a new rationale for the existence of “Directors' and Officers'” (D&O) insurance. We use a model with volatile stock markets where shareholders design compensation schemes that incentivize managers to stimulate short-term increases in stock prices that do not maximize...

We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative...

The paper examines 157 German listed corporations that had the option of changing their fiscal year to achieve a possible tax reduction in connection with the major tax reform of 2000/2001. The tax reduction from a change was larger, the larger the expected profits. However, with costs of...

From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...

The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union (EU) initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers,...