We find that the presence of independent directors who are blockholders (IDBs) in firms promotes better CEO contracting and monitoring, and higher firm valuation. Using a panel of about 11,500 firm-years with a unique, hand-collected dataset on IDB-identity and a novel instrument, we find that...

We find a highly significant hump shaped relation between Tobin's Q and CEO share ownership for firms under weak external governance (EG), but find no relation for firms under strong EG. These relations illustrate the substitution effect of EG and CEO ownership in mitigating agency problems at...

This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence and future stock price crash risk. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and misperceive negative net present value (NPV) projects as value creating. They also tend to...

Using a large sample of firms from 38 countries over the 2001-2012 period, we find evidence that following say on pay (SoP) laws, CEO pay growth rates decline and the sensitivity of CEO pay to firm performance improves. These changes are mostly concentrated on firms with high excess pay and...

CEO emotions are difficult to measure and hence empirically understudied. However, using artificial emotional intelligence, positive and negative affects can be identified from facial muscle contraction-relaxation patterns obtained from public CEO photos during initial coin offerings (ICOs),...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1993-2009, we provide evidence that the sensitivity of a chief financial officer's (CFO) option portfolio value to stock price is significantly and positively related to the firm's future stock price crash risk. In contrast, we find only weak...

Managers frequently project high synergistic gains when announcing M&As. This paper analyzes when promised synergies are value-relevant. Using text analytical methods, we only find a positive relationship between synergy projections and announcement returns when promised numerical projections...

A growing body of literature claims that CEOs are irrationally overconfident. I find evidence that this "overconfident" behavior is actually quite profitable, indicating that CEOs exhibit behavioral biases less often than previously thought. Firms with "overconfident" CEOs consistently earn...

This paper investigates under what circumstances boards of directors fire CEOs and whether this action leads to better firm performance. We use unique and detailed data, covering 473 companies in the transition region, on boards’ actions, expectations and beliefs about CEO ability. We find...