Pragmatic and effective research on corporate governance often turns critically on appreciating the legal institutions surrounding corporate entities—yet such nuances are often unfamiliar or poorly specified to economists and other social scientists without legal training. This chapter...

This article suggests a shift in how we think about agency. The essential function of agency law lies not in enabling the delegation of authority, as is widely suggested, but more significantly in its effect on creditors' rights through asset partitioning. Most of what agency law does in...

This paper outlines the foundations of corporate governance. The discussion includes a review on the modern corporation, transaction costs theory, agency costs theory, legal investor protection, investor protection by corporate governance and its various mechanisms, as well as an overview of the...

Short-term debt can reduce potential agency conflicts between managers and shareholders by exposing managers to more frequent monitoring by the credit market. Using an international dataset, we examine whether internal monitoring can substitute for external monitoring through the use of...

We examine how the legal protection of outside shareholders and the appropriative costs that they induce influence the incentives for private firms to go public. A higher degree of protection of shareholders can increase the appropriative costs associated with the conflict between managers and...