An extensive literature has analyzed the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation enacted in 2002, but its social welfare consequences remain controversial. One of the most significant provisions of SOX – auditor attestation of internal controls under Section 404(b) – has been applied only to firms...

This paper proposes a theoretical model that incorporates corporate governance into the basic CAPM, where corporate governance affects the disutility of managerial effort and the possibility of managers to divert company resources. It shows that corporate governance affects firms’ stock...

This paper proposes a theoretical model that incorporates corporate governance into the basic CAPM, where corporate governance affects the disutility of managerial effort and the possibility of managers to divert company resources. It shows that corporate governance affects firms’ stock...

My empirical results in Potrafke (2012) confirm past conclusions that Muslim-majority countries are less likely to be democratic. Hanusch takes issue with my results – and by inference with all past empirical results on the relation between Islam and democracy. In his comment on my study,...

This paper studies the factors driving changes in judicial independence (JI) as incorporated in constitutions. Two indicators of constitutionally safeguarded JI are constructed. Variations in these indicators are identified based on changes in the constitutions of as many as 100 countries that...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. The Support Vector Machines Democracy Index (SVMDI) is continuously on the 0-1-interval and enables a very detailed measurement of democracy for 188 countries...

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 analyze the causal effect of the stock of foreigners residing in a country on the probability of a terrorist attack in that country. Our instrument for the stock of foreigners relies on the interactions of two sets of variables. Variation across host-origin-dyads results from structural...

We distinguish between three sets of rights – property rights, political rights, and civil rights – and provide a taxonomy of political regimes. The distinctive nature of liberal democracy is that it protects civil rights (equality before the law for minorities) in addition to the other two....