Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause considerable damage. Agency theory's insistence on linking the compensation of managers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot be...

How do you build the best board for your organization? What attributes and skills are required by law and what mix of experiences and talents will give you the best corporate governance? What are the commonly required director attributes that are a must for each board and how do you customize...

We examine the effect of protection of proprietary information on forced CEO turnover decisions. Relying on changes in the enforceability of the covenant-not-to-compete, we show that strengthening the protection of proprietary information increases the likelihood of forced CEO turnover and the...

Valve is a “flat” company without a management hierarchy or traditional boss roles: instead of top-down organization and management, Valve employees are free to work on whatever projects they choose and to convince other employees to join collaborative groups. Decision-making is thus...

The world of mergers and acquisitions are often fraught with change, loss of identity and uncertainty for the workers who remain. The consolidation of work-groups can result in new roles, unfamiliar faces, new social structure and the introduction of foreign processes. The need to quickly...

How do you build the best board for your organization? What attributes and skills are required by law and what mix of experiences and talents will give you the best corporate governance? What are the commonly required director attributes that are a must for each board and how do you customize...

This paper asks whether adversity spurs the introduction of process innovations and increases the use of managerial incentives by firms. Using a large panel data set of workplaces in Canada, our identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in adversity arising from increased border...

An important literature has made a fundamental link between corporate governance and corporate strategy. According to agency theory, assigning managers stock options aligns their interests with the interests of the owners of the firm. This paper suggests that this may not apply in the context of...

This paper provides empirical evidence consistent with the facts that (1) social networks may strongly affect board composition and (2) social networks may be detrimental to corporate governance. Our empirical investigation relies on a unique dataset on executives and outside directors of...

We consider the current bipartite graph of German corporate boards and identify a small core of directors who are highly central in the entire network while being densely connected among themselves. To identify the core, we compare the actual number of board memberships to a random benchmark,...