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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

I use the new SEC disclosure rule of 2006 to examine the role of CEO inside debt (pension plans and deferred compensation plans) in CEO compensation problem. I find that the contribution ratio of deferred compensation to total cash compensation is positively related to firm size, firm liquidity...

This paper integrates and further develops the analysis of two discussion papers we circulated earlier, “Lucky CEOs” and “Lucky Directors.” Our study contributes to understanding the corporate governance determinants and implications of backdating practices during the decade of...