Prior research shows that firms tend to recruit directors from the geographically-proximate area. Due to a limited supply of qualified individuals in a given area, firms located in close proximity have to share a limited pool of talented individuals. As a result, the larger the number of firms...

Outside directors and audit committees are widely considered to be central elements of good corporate governance. We use a 1999 Korean law as an exogenous shock to assess how board structure affects firm market value. The law mandates 50% outside directors and an audit committee for large public...

The paper examines the relationship between managerial share ownership and firm performance for British stock-exchange listed firms. We seek to establish a link between the predictions of agency theory and the corporate control environment using key governance and disclosure thresholds as...

Competitive sorting models of the CEO labor market (e.g., Edmans, Gabaix and Landier (2009)) predict that differences in CEO productive abilities, or "talent", should be an important determinant of CEO pay. However, measuring CEO talent empirically represents a major challenge. In this paper, we...

I present and estimate a dynamic model of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation and effort provision. I find that variation in CEO attributes explains the majority of variation in compensation (equity and total) but little of the variation in firm value. The primary drivers of...

Cash holding is on average more valuable when firms are managed by overconfident CEOs. Economically, having an overconfident CEO on board is associated with an increase of $0.28 in the value of $1.00 cash holding. The positive effect of CEO overconfidence on the value of cash concentrates among...

According to the prior literature, family executives of family-controlled firms receive lower compensation than non-family executives. One of the key driving forces behind this is the existence of family members who are not involved in management, but own significant fraction of shares and...