Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

We examine how the legal protection of outside shareholders and the appropriative costs that they induce influence the incentives for private firms to go public. A higher degree of protection of shareholders can increase the appropriative costs associated with the conflict between managers and...

We analyze the long-term effects of firm break-up and ownership change on corporate performance. Our analysis is based on a unique data set for a large number of Czech firms spanning the period 1996-2005. We employ a propensity score matching procedure to deal with endogeneity problems. Our...

We use laboratory experiments to study the causal effects of favorable and unfavorable competitive market experience on cooperation in a subsequent social dilemma game. The issues we study are part of the broader topic of whether there are behavioral spillovers between different spheres of...

When managers have objectives beyond maximizing monetary profits, inefficiencies may arise. An increase in competition may then force managers to improve the productivity of the firm in order to ensure survival. While this hypothesis has received ample theoretical attention, empirical evidence...

We estimate the effects of worker voice on job quality and separations. We leverage the 1991 introduction of worker representation on boards of Finnish firms with at least 150 employees. In contrast to exit-voice theory, our difference-in-differences design reveals no effects on voluntary job...

We analyze the extent of the integrated control of the state over privatized firms during the post-privatization decade (1995-2005) in the Czech Republic. During this period the integrated control potential of the state resembled a corporate pyramid. While pyramidal control was not fully...

This study investigates boards of (non-executive) directors and whether employee representation has a positive effect on gender diversity on boards. We exploit rich, newly assembled board–director matched panel data for Norway and Germany, which contain unique information on whether a director...

We develop a macroeconomic framework in which firms are large and have market power with respect to both products and labor. Each firm maximizes a share-weighted average of shareholder utilities, which makes the equilibrium independent of price normalization. In a one-sector economy, if returns...