In many U.S. states, the law firms that represent lenders in foreclosure proceedings must hire auctioneers to carry out the foreclosure auctions. The authors empirically test whether processing times differ for law firms that integrate the mortgage foreclosure auction process compared with law...

Agency law provides a set of rules that allow business relationships to flourish. Without agency law, business relationships would be exposed to problems arising from asymmetric information that would inevitably be used to the detriment of the less knowledgeable party. This paper discusses the...

Does contract law really serve any purpose? If so, why do businessmen often resort to and rely on ‘a man’s word’ knowing that a transaction may involve inherent risks? Even in the current investment climate, are contracting parties now employing more sophisticated or advanced risk planning...

We study the relation between CEO and employee campaign contributions and find that CEO-supported political candidates receive three times more money from employees than the candidates not supported by the CEO. This relation holds around CEO departures, including plausibly exogenous departures...

Maintaining economic output during COVID-19 pandemic can result in benefits for a firm's shareholders but comes at a potential cost to public health. Using novel retail store-level data, we examine how a CEO's political leanings, measured by political donations, impacts this tradeoff. We...

We examine the effect of protection of proprietary information on forced CEO turnover decisions. Relying on changes in the enforceability of the covenant-not-to-compete, we show that strengthening the protection of proprietary information increases the likelihood of forced CEO turnover and the...

Clawbacks are contractual provisions in executive compensation contracts that allow for an ex post recoupment of variable pay if certain triggering conditions are met. As a result of regulatory responses to financial crises and corporate scandals as well as of growing shareholder pressure to...

The financial crisis has placed executive pay at center stage in the corporate governance reform debate in the United States and around the world. We consider whether a judge-made solution to the problem will support the regulatory reform effort to reduce or eliminate excessive compensation. In...

White-collar criminology scholarship shows that “accounting control frauds” (frauds led by the CEO) use accounting fraud to deceive (or suborn) sophisticated financial market participants. Large control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crimes combined....

Golden parachutes (“GPs”) are now standard contract provisions for public company CEOs. While they have become ubiquitous, they have also been severely criticized for harming shareholder value. As a result, GPs have been subjected to intense shareholder activism and uniquely penalized under...