Can female directors help save economies and the firms on whose boards they sit? Policy makers seem to think so. Numerous countries have implemented boardroom gender policies because of business case arguments. While women may be the key to healthy economies, I argue that more research needs to...

This paper provides an exhaustive literature review of the motives for public-to-private LBO transactions. First, the paper develops the theoretical framework for the potential sources of value creation from going private: a distinction is made between the reduction in shareholder-related agency...

This study documents the danger of limiting the coverage of mandatory pay disclosure. Exploiting the 2013 rule change in Korea, we find that its restrictive coverage, confined to board members with total annual pay exceeding 500 million Korean won, led a large fraction of executives to evade...

Exploiting the 2009 amendments to Regulation S-K, we provide unique evidence on the first-time disclosure of the reasons firms state for combining (separating) the roles of CEO and chairman. The stated reasons support both agency theory and organization theory. They are more numerous and...

Are courts effective monitors of corporate decisions? In a controversial landmark case, the Delaware Supreme Court held directors personally liable for breaching their fiduciary duties, signaling a sharp increase in Delaware's scrutiny over corporate decisions. In our event study, low-growth...

Shareholder valuations are economically and statistically positively correlated with independent directors' power, gauged by social network power centrality. Powerful independent directors' sudden deaths reduce shareholder value significantly; other independent directors' deaths do not. More...

We study the impact of institutional investors' “voice” on 201 going private tender offers by controlling shareholders ("freeze-out" offers) in Israel. Israeli regulatory intervention in freeze-out tender offers is relatively mild, thus institutional investors' activism becomes crucial. We...

We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared to U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results...

We investigate how company-level corporate governance practices and country-level legal investor protection jointly affect company performance. We find that in any legal regime a few specific governance practices improve performance. Companies with good governance practices operating in...