Corporations have been criticized for providing executives with excessive incentives to focus on short-term performance. This paper shows that investment in short-term projects has beneficial effects in that it provides early feedback about Chief Executive Officer (CEO) talent, which leads to...

We develop and test a simple asymmetric information model of CEO quality, in which CEOs know their quality and shareholders may only infer this from observations of corporate profits. CEOs signal their quality to shareholders by manipulating the time path of corporate profits. Though...

My dissertation examines a board's decision to hire a star CEO and the implication of such decision on the new CEO compensation and firm performance. I develop a new methodology to identify a star CEO by analyzing the texts contained in 18,240 Wall Street Journal news articles. Unlike previous...

This dissertation is composed by two essays that explore corporate governance issues in S&P firms. The first essay examines changes in corporate governance after a firm gets added to the S&P 500 index? Using firms added from 1994 to 2007, this paper examines how governance mechanisms change for...

We argue that the existence of CEO private control benefits complements managerial reputation in counteracting costly shareholder risk-shifting incentives during severe financial distress, when job-loss may be imminent. We examine this argument empirically using bankruptcy filings in Sweden,...