This Closer Look illustrates the relation between executive compensation and organizational risk through the context of the financial crisis of 2008. We demonstrate that the incentives that bankers had to increase firm risk not only increased but increased substantially in the years preceding...

We analyze the trading of corporate insiders at leading financial institutions during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. We find strong evidence of a relation between political connections and informed trading during the period in which TARP funds were disbursed, and that the relation is most...

CEO compensation is a highly controversial subject. While most company directors believe that CEO pay is not a problem, the majority of the American public believes that it is. The difficulties that boards face in justifying CEO pay levels in some ways stem from the challenge of quantifying how...

Investors rely on corporate disclosure to make informed decisions about the value of companies they invest in. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to examine disclosure practices of companies relative to peers in real time about a somewhat unprecedented shock that impacted...

This study investigates whether investors are willing to trade off wealth for societal benefits. We take advantage of unique institutional features of the municipal securities market to provide insight into this question. Since 2013, over $23 billion green bonds have been issued to fund...

Companies are required to have a reliable system of corporate governance in place at the time of IPO in order to protect the interests of public company investors and stakeholders. Yet, relatively little is known about the process by which they implement one. This Closer Look, based on detailed...

The shareholders of public corporations have considerable interest in the choice of individual to serve as CEO of their company. They want to be assured that the company has a viable plan in place to replace the current CEO if necessary. Historically, boards have deferred to outgoing CEO,...

Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big Five traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness,...

Researchers in accounting, corporate finance, economics, and law regularly evaluate the impact of corporate governance provisions on firm performance and managerial actions. Many of these studies rely on publicly available governance summaries developed by the Investor Responsibility Research...