We study changes in the design of CEO contracts when firms transition from being public with dispersed shareholders to having strong principals in the form of private equity sponsors. These principals redesign some, but far from all, contract characteristics. There is no evidence that they...

Some investment advisors offer multiple versions of a fund with the same manager and highly correlated returns. But these “twin” funds are separate portfolios for different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Using a matched sample of retail and institutional...

We investigate whether a bank’s performance during the 1998 crisis, which was viewed at the time as the most dramatic crisis since the Great Depression, predicts its performance during the recent financial crisis. One hypothesis is that a bank that has an especially poor experience in a crisis...

We investigate whether bank performance during the credit crisis of 2008 is related to CEO incentives and share ownership before the crisis and whether CEOs reduced their equity stakes in their banks in anticipation of the crisis. There is no evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were...

A firm is more likely to reappoint a former CEO to its board of directors after retirement the better is the firm's market-adjusted stock performance and the more powerful is the former CEO. Firms benefit from the presence of former CEOs on their board. Firms with former CEO directors have...

Outside directors have incentives to resign to protect their reputation or to avoid an increase in their workload when they anticipate that the firm on whose board they sit will perform poorly or disclose adverse news. We call these incentives the dark side of outside directors. We find strong...

Our paper addresses the correction of the aggregation bias in linear rational expectations models when there is some unobserved micro-parameter heterogeneity and only macro data are available. Starting from Lewbel (1994), we propose two new consistent estimators, which rely on a flexible...

In this paper, we extend the concept of News Impact Curve developed by Engle and Ng (1993) to the higher moments of the multivariate returns' distribution, thereby providing a tool to investigate the impact of shocks on the characteristics of the subsequent distribution. For this purpose, we...

We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean variance allocation, a significant cost would arise. The performance...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First,vhow can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...