This paper quantifies the degree of agency conflicts in acquiring firms. By estimating managerial valuations using a structural method and calculating shareholder valuations from stock market reactions to takeovers, I find that acquiring managers overvalue targets by 63% of target...

By means of a simple economic model, Shleifer and Vishny (1989) describe how top managers can entrench themselves by specific overinvestment. An extension of the model with additional investments exposes interdependencies that exceed the primary value of explanation. The extension of the model...

Building on a unique panel data set of German Prime Standard companies for the period 2005-2008, this paper investigates the influencing factors of both director compensation levels and structure, i.e. the probability of performance-based compensation. Drawing on agency theory arguments and...

To gain insights about the quality of board's firing decisions, we investigate abnormal stock returns and operating performance around CEO-turnover announcements in a new hand- collected sample of 208 “clean” turnover events between January 1998 and June 2009. Unlike the majority of previous...

We establish that CEOs of companies experiencing volatile industry conditions are more likely tobe dismissed. At the same time, industry risk is, controlling for various other factors, unlikelyto be directly associated with CEO compensation other than through dismissal risk. Using...

The paper studies whether and how CEO turnover in Ukrainian firms is related to their performance. Based on a novel dataset covering Ukrainian joint stock companies in 2002-2006, the paper finds statistically significant negative association between the past performance of firms measured by...

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 relationship between a CEO's social network, firm identity, and firm performance. There are two competing theories that predict contradictory outcomes. Following social network theory, one would expect a positive relation between social networks and firm performance,...

We investigate the suggested substitutive relation between executive compensation and the disciplinary threat of takeover imposed by the market for corporate control. We complement other empirical studies on managerial compensation and corporate control mechanisms in three distinct ways. First,...

Based on a two-million-observation panel dataset that matches public firms with detailed data on their employees, we find that entrenched managers pay their workers more. For example, our estimates show that CEOs with more control rights (votes) than all other blockholders together, pay their...