Federal law mandates that audit and compensation committees of public companies be comprised entirely of independent directors. The assumption underlying these legal requirements is that independent directors are more likely to act as monitors of the company's top management. In this paper, we...

Americans have a tough time saving for their retirement. To make matters worse, the move from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution plans (DC) over the years has required greater investor sophistication, discipline, and sound investment advice. Unfortunately, the current rules regarding...

Corporate fraud is costly, involving hundreds of billions of dollars in lost reputational and out of pocket costs for stakeholders and hundreds of thousands of job losses for employees, suppliers and customers as well as loss of lives. To prevent fraud, general counsels (GCs) are charged as the...

In this article, we analyze whether the manipulation of stock options still continues to this day. Our evidence shows that executives continue to employ a variety of manipulative devices to increase their compensation, including backdating, bullet-dodging, and spring- loading. Overall, we find...

Executives use a variety of manipulative games to maximize the value of their gifts, including backdating, spring-loading, bullet-dodging and insider information. We find that executives exploit a legal loophole to backdate their gifts. Stock prices rise abnormally about 6% during the one-year...