Current literature has suggested that many factors affect a firm's capital structure decision and firms do not change their capital structure very often. Such a quot;stablequot; structure has prompted Lemmon, Roberts, and Zender (2007) to advocate the use of firm fixed effect in capital...

Despite the known statistical problems with pooled regression specifications, we argue that current literature has identified a good list of factors that affect firms' capital structure decisions. In particular, to address the potential biases in both pooled and fixed effects specifications, we...

During recent years, one controversy related to CEO compensation has been a simultaneous increase in the popularity of the option grants and the dramatic increase in the total size of the CEO compensation packages. According to the current accounting standards, option grants are the only form of...

Many directors are not simply insiders or outsiders. For example, an officer of a supplier is neither independent nor captive of management. We use a spatial model of board decision-making to analyze bargaining among multiple types of directors. Board decisions are modeled using a new solution...

We study a competitive model in which firm managers differ in terms of ability, and the managers' actions are private information. Each firm chooses how able a manager to hire, and optimizes the manager's incentive pay as well as the level of cooperating resources available to the manager. Thus,...

Disclosure by firms would seem to reduce the informational asymmetry that is a cause of investment inefficiency in firms. However, the effect of disclosure is subtle, especially when the link between disclosure and firm value is endogenous and depends on incentives within the firm. We analyze...

One of the most striking features of movie business is the apparent difference in the contract design over new product introduction. Due to shelf capacity constraints retailers typically receive a higher slotting fee during the initial product introduction phase. In the movie industry, however,...

Agency models of multiple tasks typically assume independent outcomes. We show that correlation between outcomes can generate both economy and diseconomy of scale through diversification and competition effects. Additionally, the optimal compensation is non-monotone if the correlation is large.

We study a competitive model in which managers differ in ability and choose unobservable effort. Each firm chooses its size, how able a manager is to hire, and managerial compensation. The model can be considered an amalgam of agency and Superstars, where optimizing incentives enhances the...