What are the costs and benefits of retaining the former CEO on the board? Corporate boards frequently debate this question as part of the CEO succession process. Like many governance issues, empirical evidence indicates that a number of factors are involved in and may drive this on-going...

This paper studies how CEO pay and its composition is shaped by strategic factors related to the firm's capacity to generate rents and value, the uncertainty of its resource advantage, and the competitive interaction between firm stakeholders and top management. This is done using an analytical...

We extend prior empirical research on the questions of whether, how much, and under which conditions strategic leaders matter to the fate of their firms. With a 20-year Panel of 110 German firms, our analysis broadens the prevalent focus on CEO influences in U.S. settings. The results indicate...

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns...

Americans tend to admire powerful leaders. Powerful leaders are seen as exerting influence over their organizations and shaping outcomes around them. CEO power can be exercised across a wide spectrum of decisions, including those regarding corporate strategy, operations, acquisitions,...

While the literature appeals to efficiency arguments from agency theory to explain the relative rise of CEO equity compensation, prior work has given less focus to CEO pay contracts based on equity and cash incentives that directly (analytically) maximize the total return of firm owners. The...

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...

What is the value of political capital for individuals? Towards the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, military and civilian collaborators entered the business elite, controlling the largest and most important firms in the country. Using a novel panel dataset of board members in these...

Credit unions compete directly with commercial banks in markets for consumer financial services yet receive an exemption from federal corporate income tax. Commercial banks claim that credit unions are no different than banks and that the credit union tax exemption represents an unfair...