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...

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...

The Eroding Trust in Capitalism and its Consequences for Law: On both sides of the Atlantic, legislators consider a cap on manager income. As a redistributive intervention, the cap would be misplaced. It affects such a small number of persons that the effect on the Gini coefficient would be...