In “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate,“ Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor analyze the causal effects of terrorist attacks on the political preferences of the Israeli electorate. In this comment, I discuss Berrebi and Klor's empirical approach -...

We present a theory of endogenous political regimes that emphasizes overseas investments and that foreign governments may either induce regime transitions or promote regime consolidations. In our theory, foreign intervention is driven by the interaction between strategic foreign investments and...

This paper seeks to expand on two topical strands in Government Finance and Political Science literature, rent-seeking and the soft-budget constraint, so as to bring forth a strong linkage between them in corporate governance environments. It hopes to accomplish this target by setting up a...

In this paper, we review the recent literature on conflict and appropriation. Allowing for the possibility of conflict, which amounts to recognizing the possibility that property rights are not perfectly and costlessly enforced, represents a significant departure from the traditional paradigm of...

The size of a supermajority required to change an existing contract varies widely in different settings. This paper analyzes the optimal supermajority requirement, determined by multilateral bargaining behind the veil of ignorance. The optimum is determined by a tradeoff between reducing hold-up...

This paper reviews past, present and proposed practices for protecting investors from self-dealing by a dominant shareholder and/or management. The origin of audit committees is reviewed and their efficacy analyzed when a dominant shareholder and/or management can control the composition of the...

This paper identifies some policy options for encouraging widely dispersed shareholders and/or their fiduciary agents to become more effective in controlling corporations. Even though institutional shareholders have a fiduciary responsibility to exercise their ownership rights to discipline...

The paper identifies three necessary conditions for investors and other stakeholders to trust companies and how such conditions might be met. First, directors require systemic processes for obtaining information independently of management on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats...

This paper identifies eight reasons why it is rational not to trust large complex Anglo corporations and how these reasons could be removed. Two reasons are that directors are overloaded with information but also lack information independent of management to evaluate management and the business....

This paper explains why so called quot;world best practicesquot; in corporate governance developed in the US and the UK represent the problem not the solution for the crisis in capitalism that has reduced share values by trillions of dollars. One reason is that a unitary board has absolute power...