"In every corporation, there is an inherent conflict between the interests of the executives running the company and the shareholders who own it. The corporate governance issues resulting from these conflicts can lead to public and sometimes costly scandals: leaked excessive pay packages, CEOs...

This paper presents a real-options model of entrenchment in which a CEO chooses how much effort to put into boosting a firm's productivity and the board and CEO bargain over executive-compensation and investment policies. The surplus that bargaining allocates derives from the reduction in value...

We show how CEO ownership and the market for corporate control interact to influence the investment-timing decisions of empire-building CEOs. The prospect of a future takeover means that CEOs with no ownership stake will over-invest in some types of projects and under-invest in others, but these...