A long-standing controversy is whether CEO employment contracts insulate inferior managers from discipline leading to shareholder wealth destruction, or whether contracts alleviate managerial risk aversion and encourage value-enhancing decisions. Using a unique dataset on S&P 500 CEO employment...

Using CEO severance contracts during 1992-2010, we find that CEOs with a severance contract tend to reduce corporate investments, impede innovation, and decrease firm risk across several dimensions, leading to shareholder value destruction. This negative value effect is stronger during the...

We study whether changes in corporate governance and CEO power affect bonus-based implicit relative performance evaluation (RPE). We rely on a regression discontinuity design of shareholder proposals to proxy for shocks to CEO power. The effect of shareholder proposals on RPE is stronger under...

We provide a comprehensive study of how different corporate governance mechanisms influence corporate innovation. Using panel data regression analysis across a sample of more than 13,600 firm-years for firms based in the United States between 1996-2010, we find that entrenched boards, though...