Contemporary bank governance is criticized for manager-dominated (insider) boards of directors, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century, bank presidents appear also to have operated as chairmen of the boards of directors. However, the managers were constrained by a variety of rules that...

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is, at least on paper, enjoying widespread popularity in determining the level of executive compensation. Yet existing empirical evidence of RPE is decidedly mixed. Two principal explanations are held responsible for this discord. A constructional challenge...

This paper integrates the problem of designing corporate bank-ruptcy rules into a theory of optimal debt structure. We show that, in an incomplete-contracts framework with imperfect renegotiation, having multiple creditors increases a firms debt capacity while increasing its incentives to...

This paper presents a model of executive compensation in which the executive is risk averse and has specific knowledge - knowledge about the optimal actions to take that is costly to transfer to the principal. The model generates predictions that are consistent with the available evidence and...

We investigate the role of analyst following as a monitoring device reducing earnings management. In a large international sample, we fi nd that the more transparent the country, the stronger the reduction in earnings management activity associated with analyst following. More transparent...

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is, at least on paper, enjoying widespread popularity in determining the level of executive compensation. Yet existing empirical evidence of RPE is decidedly mixed. Two principal explanations are held responsible for this discord. A constructional challenge...

This paper seeks to understand the extent financialisation has had an impact on the rental housing market in Berlin. Specifically, it focuses on the financialisation of non-financial rental housing companies. The financial statements of five large, publicly listed, commercial rental housing...

This paper studies dynamic information acquisition in financial markets with information asymmetry. It first shows that multiplicity can arise in the information market due to a dynamic complementarity in information acquisition. It then characterizes interactions between information...

We study the relationship between the risk of default and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors using Supervised Machine Learning (SML) techniques on a cross-section of European listed companies. Our proxy for credit risk is the z-score originally proposed by Altman (1968). We...

This paper investigates the impact of financialization and changes in corporate governance on income inequality for a sample of 13 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. Though financialization and changes in corporate governance have been widespread, there has been little empirical analysis of...