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...

This paper studies, in a world with differing priors, the role of organizational beliefs and managerial vision in the behavior and performance of corporations. The paper defines vision operationally as a very strong belief by the manager about the right course of action for the firm. The...

Using the recent events at AIG as a case‐study, the paper tests the efficacy of the framework of contemporary corporate governance – namely, the monitoring role assigned to the boards of public corporations and an emphasis on director independence. The article refers to statutory filings,...

CEO compensation is increasingly being linked to ESG outcomes. In this paper, we provide evidence that ESG targets in CEO pay reflect stakeholder welfare. Using granular information on contract design from Swedish firms, we show that ESG-linked contracts are more likely for CEOs with broader...

Stakeholders are increasingly concerned with the social and environmental impacts of modern corporations. These concerns have led to directly incentivizing CEOs by making their pay contingent on ESG outcomes. In this paper, we propose to examine the implications of ESG-linked pay on the CEO...

We extend the literature on the effects of managerial entrenchment to consider how safety-net subsidies and financial distress costs interact with managerial incentives to influence capital structure in U.S. commercial banking. Using cross-sectional data on publicly traded, highest-level U.S....

In this paper we offer an alternative framework for examining why risk matters in the decisions of economic agents, and how the agent’s risk attitude affects his decisions. This “Threshold Theory” framework is based on a real options approach and the observation that in many situations an...

Little is known about why CEOs voluntarily purchase shares of their firm other than because they expect to directly profit from doing so. However, since CEOs are risk-averse, highly un-diversified, and face litigation costs from trading on favorable private information, direct profits are...

Information-based theories of financial intermediation focus on delegated monitoring. However, there is little evidence on how markets discipline intermediaries who fail at this function. We exploit the direct link between corporate fraud and monitoring failure and examine how a venture capital...