The 21st century has been marred by corporate scandal after scandal, including financial fraud, pyramid schemes, international bribery, and decades of sexual harassment. This raises an important question regarding the role of corporate and tort law in controlling the behavior of corporate...

Directors and supervisory board members (officers) are increasingly being held personally liable. Directors & Officers (D&O) liability insurance offers directors and supervisory board members ample protection against directors' and officers' liability. On the one hand, this has many advantages...

This paper focuses on the issue of whether shareholder litigations brought in the U.S. - namely, derivative suits and securities class actions - and their equivalent in the Italian law system, achieve their principal regulatory goal of deterring corporate directors and officers from engaging in...

This paper examines the two-way relationship between managerial compensation and corporate risk by exploiting an unanticipated change in firms' business risks. The natural experiment provides an opportunity to examine two classic questions related to incentives and risk — how boards adjust...

This paper reviews the history of executive compensation disclosure and other government policies affecting CEO pay, and as well surveys the literature on the effects of these policies. Disclosure has increased nearly uniformly since 1933. A number of other regulations, including special taxes...

We address one of the cardinal puzzles of European corporate law: the lack of derivate share-holder suits. We explain this phenomenon on the basis of percentage limits which require share-holders to hold a minimum amount of shares in order to bring a lawsuit. We show that, under this legal...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed 'hard' information about the board's...

In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by...

This paper investigates the impact of the target chief executive officer’s (CEO) postmerger position on the purchase premium and target shareholders’ abnormal returns around the announcement of the deal in a sample of bank mergers during the period 1990–2004. We find evidence that the...