Real estate developments are typically conducted through the medium of business entities intended to shield its owners of individual liability. Corporations, limited liability companies and limited partnerships have traditionally been viewed as effective mechanisms to accomplish this outcome....

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...

Using the passage of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act (FTDA) as an exogenous shock to trademark protection, we find that stronger trademark protection induces firms to increase their CEO risk-taking incentives as measured by CEO portfolio vega. The effect is greater for firms facing more...

From Star Trek's Captain Kirk leaving a video to be watched upon his death in his attempt to get Spock and McCoy to work together in an emergency situation to Rodrigo Rosenberg making an 18-minute video to be viewed upon his disappearance in May 2009, which allegedly named his murderer, people...

This paper reviews the history of executive compensation disclosure and other government policies affecting CEO pay, and as well surveys the literature on the effects of these policies. Disclosure has increased nearly uniformly since 1933. A number of other regulations, including special taxes...

We address one of the cardinal puzzles of European corporate law: the lack of derivate share-holder suits. We explain this phenomenon on the basis of percentage limits which require share-holders to hold a minimum amount of shares in order to bring a lawsuit. We show that, under this legal...

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...

In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by...

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...