This paper surveys the literature criticizing the view that managers should run companies aiming to create shareholder value by maximizing stock prices. Based on a multidisciplinary approach, I include empirical and theoretical papers from fields such as corporate law, management, finance,...

Owing to the decreased profitability of real economy and the significantly increased return on financial assets since the beginning of the 21st century, non-financial firms in China are increasingly inclined to hold more financial assets. This paper performs an empirical study on the...

Corporate governance studies typically assume that the CEO is the main locus of business power. However, when the CEO and Chairman positions are split, the de facto role of corporate leader may reside in the hands of a person who usually chairs the board but does not necessarily hold the CEO...

This paper examines the role of bank representatives on the firm's board of directors and their influence on risk and managerial compensation. After the firm has taken on debt for a big-scale lump-sum investment project, the bank representatives are inclined to lower the project risk, which is...

We examine whether CEO extraversion, an important personality trait associated with leadership, affects firms' expected cost of equity capital. We measure CEO extraversion using CEOs' speech patterns during the unscripted portion of conference calls. After controlling for several CEO and firm...

Prior literature shows that financial disclosures and corporate governance both impact firm performance. This paper documents an important topic that has been overlooked in the prior literature, their joint effect, because the two mechanisms could be independent, substitutive, or complementary...

Financial restatements are costly, but frequent, events and many firms restate several times. This paper asks why rational managers engage in misreporting, in spite of the costly consequences. We present a simple extension to the Fischer and Verrecchia (2000) model, which provides testable...

Our study explores how managerial stock holdings and option holdings affect CEOs' income smoothing incentives. Given the different roles of stock holdings and option holdings in solving agency problems, managers may smooth past earnings using discretionary accruals for the purpose of revealing...

This study examines the impact of CEO inside debt on earnings management. Theory predicts that CEOs with higher inside debt holdings adopt less risky corporate policies and choose investment policies that result in less volatile earnings. Under such circumstances, CEOs would face weaker demand...

Using a hand-collected sample of Italian family and non-family-controlled firms, we investigate the moderating effect of family ownership on the relation between earnings management and CEO turnover. Consistent with agency theory, we find a positive and significant relation between earnings...