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 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...

On July 1, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed an excess-pay clawback rule to implement the provisions of Section 954 of the Dodd-Frank Act. I explain why the SEC's proposed Dodd-Frank clawback, while reducing executives' incentives to misreport, is overbroad. The economy...

In this article, we argue that the U.S. corporate governance rules put too much faith in the independent board members and insufficient emphasis on the shareholders themselves to control and monitor the top management. Given the agency problem between the board of directors and the shareholders,...

We investigate the impact of introduction of personal liability on the market for independent directors (IDs), particularly the acceptance of directorship offers by candidate IDs. Using a game theoretic framework and constructing games involving different information regimes, types of insiders...

The competitive target pay policy sets a target dollar number for total CEO compensation within a specified range of the amounts paid to a CEO’s peers chosen from similar sized firms in the same industry. If such a policy were widely adopted by compensation committees, we would observe a...

This study compares CEO employment contracts across two common law countries: the United States and Australia. Although the regulatory regimes of these jurisdictions enjoy many comparable features, there are also some important institutional differences in terms of capital market, tax, and...

This Article is the first academic study to systematically analyze the overall sensitivity of executive compensation to stock buybacks. Specifically, my analysis of executive compensation arrangements of CEOs included in the S&P 500 Index reveals that buybacks can enhance a record high portion...

Corporate law and corporate governance are often called upon to address problems in international and transnational contexts. Financial markets are global and the problems in those markets are often similar, if not identical, even though the capital market structure across jurisdictions differs...

Starting from January 2017, all publicly listed firms in the United States are required to disclose a pay ratio of annual CEO compensation to the median employee compensation (Pay Ratio). Opponents of this legislation have argued that this additional Pay Ratio disclosure would simply add to the...