In 2001, Nevada significantly limited the personal legal liability of corporate officers and directors. We use this exogenous shock to implement a differences-in-differences design that examines the impact of officer and director litigation risk on agency costs. We find decreased firm value,...

The aim of this paper is to explain relationship between earning management, corporate governance and managerial optimism through the governance characteristics that are board of directors such as independence, duality and size and ownership structure such as managerial participation, block...

In this study, I summarize the current state of executive compensation, discuss measurement and incentive issues, document recent trends in executive pay in both U.S. and international firms, and analyze the evolution of executive pay over the past century. Most recent analyses of executive...

We analyze 228 executive compensation contracts voluntarily disclosed by Chinese listed firms and find that central-government-controlled companies disclose more information in executive compensation contracts than local-government-controlled and non-government-controlled companies. Cash-based...

This paper studies the effects of interlocked boards of directors on voluntary disclosures, governance practices and earnings quality. The Canadian environment, where director interlocks are prevalent, is examined. A checklist of twenty voluntary disclosure measures from proxy statements is...

Early empirical studies find a negative association between firm performance and shareholder activism, whereas more recent studies document a positive association. We argue and theoretically show that this change in behavior results from mandating executive compensation disclosure. We develop a...

Previous studies on the value relevance of board gender and ethnic diversity produced mixed results. This paper re-examines this relationship using hand-collected data of 245 South African listed firms over the period 2008-2013. We document a positive and significant effect of both board gender...

CEOs of S&P 500 firms that report high non-GAAP earnings relative to GAAP earnings receive more than $600 thousand in unexplained pay. The abnormally high pay appears even after controlling for the level of non-GAAP earnings and despite relatively weak GAAP performance and low returns....

These slides summarize a paper on opportunism by corporate insiders. We show that opportunistic insiders can be identified through the profitability of their trades prior to quarterly earnings announcements (QEAs), and that opportunistic trading is associated with various kinds of...

We examine whether the information content of the earnings report, as captured by the earnings response coefficient (ERC), increases when investors' uncertainty about the manager's reporting objectives decreases, as predicted in Fischer and Verrecchia (2000). We use the 2006 mandatory...