Of the many fundamental questions left unanswered in finance, one relates to corporate risk management practices. My contention in this paper is that managerial habits and organizational inertia play an important role in the decision to purchase corporate insurance and engage in risk management...

Corporate directors are liable for the corporation's actions as well as their own. Strangely, and by far, the most likely plaintiffs in a lawsuit against corporate directors are the shareholders who appointed them in the first place. As a result, directors often require protection so that their...

Any investor faces important risk when investing in a public firm; risk is even more pronounce when investing in new public firms since relatively little is known at the time of the initial public offering. The information asymmetry problem is partially mitigated through the underpricing of the...

This paper develops and tests hypotheses regarding the relationship between D&O insurance purchase and firm size, governance characteristics, and business risk, using a unique panel dataset on Canadian firms for years 1996-2005. The rich data permit examination of the determinants of insurance...

We find that common equity firms pay lower D&O insurance premiums than income trusts, an alternative and riskier ownership form. This result has wide-ranging implications for investors insofar as the information provided by D&O insurers provides investors with an unbiased signal of the firm's...

This study investigates how directors' and officers' liability insurance (hereafter D&O insurance) affects corporate diversification and post-diversification performance. Using a sample of 671 Taiwanese listed firms, we find that excessive D&O liability insurance is positively associated with...

This manuscript summarizes a speech given at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia on May 14, 2013. The speech begins with a discussion of ethical theory and how it can be applied to the topic of government regulation of business, and proceeds to summarize some recent studies on the costs...

A review of the basic theory of optimal open-source software contributions points to three keyfactors affecting supply: non-pecuniary benefits, future expected monetary returns, and opensourcelicence type...

We compare the returns to education (RTE) for entrepreneurs and employees, based on 19waves of the NLSY database. By using instrumental variable techniques (IV) and takingaccount of selectivity, we find that the RTE are significantly higher for entrepreneurs than foremployees (18.3 percent and...

Entrepreneurship literature (Parker 2004) has rarely considered spatial locationas a micro-determinant of occupational choice, although there are compellingreasons to posit that spatial location influences economic behavior. Using Bayesiansemiparametric methodologies and geoadditive techniques,...