Good managers can give firms a competitive edge with respect to their industry rivals. This paper studies how shareholders design the structure of corporate ownership optimally - i.e., how they provide incentives - in order to exploit the competitive effect of managerial skills. A central...

The rise in intangible capital is a fundamental driver of the secular trend in US corporate cash holdings over the last decades. We construct a new measure of intangible capital and show that intangible capital is the most important firm-level determinant of corporate cash holdings. Our measure...

This paper develops a competitive equilibrium model of CEO compensation and industry dynamics. CEOs make product pricing and product improvement decisions subject to shareholders' compensation choices and idiosyncratic shocks to product quality. The choice of high-powered incentives optimally...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the rise in intangible capital is a fundamental driver of the secular trend in US corporate cash holdings over the last decades. Using a new measure, we show that intangible capital is the most important firm-level determinant of corporate cash holdings...

This paper evaluates quantitatively the macroeconomic implications of corporate governance institutions within a model where the size and distribution of firms and the structure of financial markets are jointly determined. If firms adapt their financing modes to economic conditions, aggregate...

This paper develops a competitive equilibrium model of CEO compensation and industry dynamics. CEOs make product pricing and product improvement decisions subject to shareholders' compensation choices and idiosyncratic shocks to product quality. The choice of high-powered incentives optimally...

This paper examines the labor market for CEOs in the financial sector from 1988 to 2007, using a new hand-collected sample of 1,655 CEO successions. We document that there is a significant role of outside successions, as about one out of two successions involves an outside hire. In addition,...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the rise in intangible capital is a fundamental driver of the secular trend in US corporate cash holdings over the last decades. Using a new measure,we show that intangible capital is the most important firm-level determinant of corporate cash holdings....

We use the deaths of directors and chief executive officers as a natural experiment to generate exogenous variation in the time and resources available to independent directors at interlocked firms. The loss of such key co-employees is an attention shock because it increases the board committee...

This paper studies whether financial contracts exacerbate or mitigate agency conflicts among stakeholders. We consider a specific contractual provision, debt covenants, and examine how, by allocating control rights between shareholders and debtholders, debt covenants affect the employment...