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...

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 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 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...

We document that for a group of high-income countries (i) mean earnings of managers tend to grow faster than for non managers over the life cycle; (ii) the earnings growth of managers relative to non managers over the life cycle is positively correlated with output per worker. We interpret this...

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...

After several decades’ worth of federal and state regulatory intervention, the quality of the environment in the United States is markedly better today that it was at the founding of the modern environmental era. Nevertheless, environmental regulation remains the target of intense criticism,...

Adam Smith warned that the officers of corporations were likely to be unfaithful agents that would harm shareholders. Modern anti-regulatory economists sought to remedy this flaw at capitalism’s core by supercharging executive compensation. However, modern compensation systems further...