Economic models routinely assume firms maximize shareholder wealth; however common law legal systems only require that officers and directors pursue the interests of the corporation, leaving this ill-defined. Economic arguments for shareholder wealth maximization derived from shareholders'...

How persistent are the effects of legal institutions adopted or inherited in the distant past? A substantial literature argues that legal origins have persistent effects that explain clear differences in investor protections and financial development around the world today (La Porta et al, 1998,...

Classic Big Push industrialization envisions state planners coordinating economic activity to internalize a range of externalities that otherwise lock in a low-income equilibrium, but runs afoul of well-known government failure problems. Successful Big Push coordination may occur instead when a...

We examine the impact of bank supervision on the financing obstacles faced by almost 5,000 corporations across 49 countries. We find that firms in countries with strong official supervisory agencies that directly monitor banks tend to face greater financing obstacles. Moreover, powerful official...

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal...

A manager's current and potential future employers are continually assessing her or his ability. Such assessment is a crucial component of corporate governance and this chapter provides an overview of the research on that aspect of governance. In particular, we review how assessment generates...

We provide an autopsy of the patterns of corporate control and ownership concentration in a dataset covering more than 40,000 listed firms from 127 countries over 2004−2012. Employing a plethora of original and secondary sources, big data techniques, and applying the Shapley-Shubik algorithm...

We derive conditions for when having a “busy” director on the board is harmful to shareholders and when it is beneficial. Our model allows directors to condition their monitoring choices on their co-directors' choices and to experience positive or negative monitoring synergies across firms....

We use a dataset of over 2,600 executive assessments to study thirty individual characteristics of candidates for top executive positions – CEO, CFO, COO and others. We classify the thirty candidate characteristics with four primary factors: general ability, execution vs. interpersonal,...

We examine the turnover of top executives in Japanese firms throughout the period from 1990 to 2013. During this time, the presence of a main bank has been weakened, the ownership of institutional investors has dramatically increased, and independent outside directors have been introduced in...