Individual leaders have been central to the transformation of organizations, political institutions and many instances of social and economic reform. In this paper we take a first step towards analyzing the role of leadership to ask: when and how does a leader engineer change? We show that while...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

We develop a theory of income and payout smoothing by firms when insiders know more about income than outside shareholders, but property rights ensure that outsiders can enforce a fair payout. Insiders set payout to meet outsiders' expectations and underproduce to manage downward future...

I document that for a group of 38 countries ranging from low to high income: (1) the share of skilled managers is higher in richer countries, (2) the relative income of managers to non-managers is lower in richer countries, and (3) the relative income of skilled to unskilled individuals is lower...

We develop a theory of income and payout smoothing by firms when insiders know more about income than outside shareholders, but property rights ensure that outsiders can enforce a fair payout. Insiders set payout to meet outsiders' expectations and underproduce to manage future expectations...

This paper presents a model to account for the behaviour of social elites, in terms of their decisions to distribute resources between themselves, and a mass of disadvantaged members of society. Privileged members of society have the opportunity to allocate resources either to improve their own...

We apply a dictionary method to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ microdata on CEO changes, in order to construct a country-level manager turnover index. Next, we study the relation between manager turnover, distance to the technology frontier and economic growth in a panel of countries. Our...

This Article reports results of an empirical study that suggests that the current economic crisis has changed managerial behavior in the US in a way that may impede economic recovery. The study finds a strong, statistically significant and economically meaningful, positive correlation between...