We study the relation between opportunistic timing of option grants and corporate governance failures, focusing on "lucky" grants awarded at the lowest price of the grant month. Option grant practices were designed to provide lucky grants not only to executives but also to independent directors....

We investigate the relation between the CEO Pay Slice (CPS)--the fraction of the aggregate compensation of the top-five executive team captured by the Chief Executive Officer--and the value, performance, and behavior of public firms. The CPS could reflect the relative importance of the CEO as...

The correlation between governance indices and abnormal returns documented for 1990–1999 subsequently disappeared. The correlation and its disappearance are both due to market participants' gradually learning to appreciate the difference between good-governance and poor-governance firms....

In many business bankruptcies in which the firm is to be preserved as a going concern, one of the most difficult and important problems is that of valuing the assets that serve as collateral for secured creditors. Valuing a secured creditor’s collateral is needed to determine the amount...

With contributions from some of the leading scholars in law and economics, this comprehensive book summarizes the state of economic research on litigation, procedure and evidence.

This article develops a model of a self-fulfilling credit market freeze and uses it to study alternative governmental responses to such a crisis. We study an economy in which operating firms are interdependent, where their success depends on the ability of other operating firms to obtain...

We model how three groups--insiders in existing public companies, institutional investors, and entrepreneurs planning to take firms public--compete for influence over politicians setting the level of investor protection. We identify factors that push toward suboptimal investor protection,...

This article, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance cosponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven articles on corporate...

This paper provides an overview of the main theoretical elements and empirical underpinnings of a "managerial power" approach to executive compensation. Under this approach, the design of executive compensation is viewed not only as an instrument for addressing the agency problem between...

This paper, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance co-sponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate...