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...

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...

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...

This paper investigates under what circumstances boards of directors fire CEOs and whether this action leads to better firm performance. We use unique and detailed data, covering 473 companies in the transition region, on boards’ actions, expectations and beliefs about CEO ability. We find...

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...

We analyze a hand-collected dataset of 1669 executive compensation packages at 34 firms included in the main German stock market index (DAX) for the years 2006- 2014 in order to investigate the impact of the 2009 say on pay legislation. First, we observe that the compensation packages of...

In this Article we submit that the compensation structures at banks before the financial crisis were not necessarily flawed and that recent reforms in this area largely reflect already existing best practices. In Part I we review recent empirical studies on corporate governance and executive pay...

I explore whether directors who resign in dissent from their board are rewarded in the labor market for directors. Using a hand collected sample of 278 boardroom disputes reported in 8-K filings during 1995-2006, I show that firms which have disputes are small, highly levered, have poor...

Modern remuneration systems for executive directors include substantial elements of performance based pay. The idea behind this is that by rewarding executives for performance their interests become aligned with those of the company's shareholders, thus bridging the principal-agent gap....

General Motor's ability to exit bankruptcy through a public offering of its common stock (IPO) depended heavily on the sacrifices of active and retired members of the United Auto Workers (UAW). A review of the now public filings of GM related to the IPO indicate the significant concessions UAW...