This note compares the investment policy and managerial compensation in family and non-family firms. The model is based on one hand a manager/shareholders conflict that should be more pronounced in non-family firms. Secondly large shareholders/small shareholders conflict should play a...

We analyze the impact of partial public ownership (PPO) on managerial incentives. A novelty of the paper is that it explicitly considers competition in the product market. We find that PPO negatively affects managerial incentives when all firms are partially owned by the government. When...

In the cultural context of “the children follow the father’s surname”, the incorporation of both parents’ surnames into the children’s surnames (i.e., the “new compound surnames” phenomenon) reflects the conceptual change during the modernization of society. Using a sample of...

Business income constitutes a large and increasing share of income and wealth at the top of the distribution. We discuss how tax policy treats and shapes how businesses are organized and how they distribute economic gains to owners, with the focus on closely-held and pass-through firms. These...

Does who makes government policy matter to CEOs? Using data on the birthplace of US CEOs, I show that CEOs who were born in blue (Democrat) states display overconfidence when there is a Democratic president, whereas CEOs who were born in red (Republican) states display overconfidence when there...

The aim of the paper is to present the development stages of the executive directors' remuneration. The focus is on the components of remuneration and, to a lesser extent, on its value. The executive directors are the object of paper.The results of the paper set ten stages for the period...

We show that firms with corporate charitable foundations increased shareholder distributions by less than one half as much as similar firms without foundations following the 2003 capital income tax cut, even after controlling for common explanatory factors such as executive shareholding. The...

Little evidence exists on whether boards help managers make better decisions. We provide evidence that strong and independent boards help overconfident CEOs avoid honest mistakes when they seek to acquire other companies. In addition, we find that once-overconfident CEOs make better acquisition...

Do stakeholder suits against managers reduce agency costs? I examine this question using a large panel of private foundation tax returns, together with hand-collected data on state-law variations in the right of donors to sue wayward nonprofit managers. In both difference-in-differences and...

The literature on chief executive officers (CEOs) establishes that economic and sociological rationales are both essential to understand the level and structure of CEOs' compensation. Our thesis is that internal "transaction costs" or frictions override strictly economic criteria to determine...