This paper examines the relation between cognitive perceptions of management and firm valuation. We develop a composite measure of investor perception using 30-second content-filtered video clips of initial public offering (IPO) roadshow presentations. We show that this measure, designed to...

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at conglomerates, we find that a change in industry surplus in one division generates large spillovers on managerial payoffs in other divisions of the same firm. These spillovers arise only within the boundaries of a conglomerate but not between...

Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big Five traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness,...

Prior research indicates that CEO media visibility significantly impacts firm value and CEO career outcomes. We investigate whether and how CEOs strategically use disclosures to influence media coverage of themselves. We develop a measure of “CEO promotion” based on the CEO's presence in...

Pay for non-performance is among the most prominent arguments of executive rent extraction, especially Bertrand and Mullainathan's (2001) pay for luck. We revisit their finding over the last two decades, 1997 through 2016. Pay for luck presents in the first decade but declines in the second...

The hallmark of good corporate governance is an independent board of directors to oversee management. However, it is not clear that independent directors receive the information they need to make fully informed decisions on all key matters. Partly, this is due to an information gap, whereby...

We examine the selection of peer groups that boards of directors use when setting CEO compensation. The challenge is to ascertain whether peer groups are selected to (i) attract and retain executive talent and/or (ii) enable rent extraction by inappropriately increasing compensation. We find...

CEO activism — the practice of CEOs taking public positions on environmental, social, and political issues not directly related to their business — has become a hotly debated topic in corporate governance. To better understand the implications of CEO activism, we examine its prevalence, the...

Active fund managers are skilled and, on average, have used their skill to generate about $3.2 million per year. Large cross-sectional differences in skill persist for as long as ten years. Investors recognize this skill and reward it by investing more capital in funds managed by better...