We examine CEO compensation, CEO retention policies, and M&A decisions in firms where founders serve as a director with a non-founder CEO (founder-director firms). We find that founder-director firms offer a different mix of incentives to their CEOs than other firms. Pay for performance...

One can define entrepreneurship, at its most basic level, as rent-seeking behavior. This behavior can be productive, as when firms innovate to create new or better products or when they enter a market to increase output where price exceeds marginal cost. Rent-seeking can also be unproductive,...

As shown in previous studies, founder-led firms perform better than those run by professional managers. Does this reflect the special relation of founders to their firms or do entrepreneurs possess attributes and experiences that are valuable even at firms not founded by them? Drawing on the...