The founding directors of newly incorporated companies bring social capital (reputation, networks, business relationships) and human capital (task-related, professional and director experience) to a new venture and founding boards vary in degree of heterogeneity (size, diversity, turnover). This...

This paper studies whether banks charge higher or lower interest rates on loans to firms with overconfident CEOs. It establishes a theoretical model to show the relationship between the loan rate and overconfidence of the borrowing firm's CEO. It also conducts empirical analyses to test the...

This paper studies whether banks charge higher or lower interest rates on loans to firms with overconfident CEOs. It establishes a theoretical model to show the relationship between the loan rate and overconfidence of the borrowing firm's CEO. It also conducts empirical analyses to test the...

In this study, we examine whether the initiation of credit default swaps affects the reference entity's executive compensation design. With both human capital and financial capital highly associated with the firm's bankruptcy risk, risk averse managers prefer cash compensation over option...

We investigate the risk choices of risk averse CEOs. Following recent theoretical work, we expect CEO risk aversion to be more pronounced in firms with high leverage, or high default probability. We find that the CEOs of these firms reduce firm risk, even in the presence of strong risk taking...

Shareholders in distressed firms should profit from shifting to more risky assets, but there is little empirical evidence documenting such behavior. We find that this weak evidence is consistent with creditors being somewhat able to control the investment policies of distressed firms if distress...

In this article, we show that only distressed firms not identified as distressed by creditors are able to transfer wealth from creditors to shareholders. Using the number of years to future bankruptcy as a proxy for genuine distress and measures based on observable firm characteristics as...

This paper studies the impact of executive pensions and deferred compensation plans, collectively known as "inside debt'', on corporate failures. I find that, on average, a firm whose CEO holds a larger fraction of the firm's debt than equity (i.e., when the ratio of the CEO's inside debt...

The aim of this paper is to investigate if top executives’ turnover affects the performance of a company and if it differently impacts the performances of a healthy and a restructured company. In order to investigate the impact of the renewal of both members of the board of directors and CEO...

The founding directors of newly incorporated companies bring social capital (reputation, networks, business relationships) and human capital (task-related, professional and director experience) to a new venture and founding boards vary in degree of heterogeneity (size, diversity, turnover). This...