In recent years bonuses tied to performance have become commonplace in banks and other financial institutions; indeed they now constitute a major part of employee compensation.  The practice was originally justified by academic work on principal-agent contracts, which argued that performance...

We posit that screening IPOs requires specialized labor which, in the short run, is in fixed supply.  Hence, a sudden increase in demand for IPO financing increases the compensation of IPO screening labor.  Increased compensation results in reduced screening which encourages sub-marginal firms...

This paper considers optimal compensation for a CEO who is entrusted with administering corporate assets honestly.  Optimal compensation designs maximize integrity at minimum cost.  These designs are very 'low powered', i.e., while specifying a lower bound for performance and increasing pay...

We model corporate governance in a world with competitive securities markets as well as markets for corporate assets.  We show that varying the liquidity and opacity of corporate assets, the vitality of the market for corporate control, and the costs of enforcing shareholder rights to cash...

We model long-run firm performance, management compensation, and corporate governance in a dynamic, nonstationary world.  We show that managerial compensation and governance policies, which, in a single-period context, can best be rationalized by self-serving managerial influence over board...

This paper investigates the relation between stock liquidity and firm performance.  We find that firms with liquid stocks have better firm performance as measured by the market-to-book ratio.  This result holds even when we include industry or firm fixed effects, control for idiosyncratic...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building.  We test this result with a laboratory experiment.  We...

This paper develops and experimentally implements a simple multi-negotiation bargaining game, in which one agent, called the "developer", must reach agreements with a series of other agents, called "landowners", in order to implement a value-increasing project.  The game has a unique subgame...

We model and experimentally examine the board structure-performance relationship.  We examine single-tiered boards, two-tiered boards, insider-controlled boards, and outsider-controlled boards.  We find that even insider-controlled boards frequently adopt institutionally preferred rather than...