How do we prevent financial institutions from taking excessive risk when the public fisc serves as their ultimate creditor? This is one of the central questions left over after the recent financial crisis and, for the past five years, there has been no shortage of proposed answers. Two of the...

Does personal litigation risk for independent directors materially affect firm valuation, compensation-related issues for independent directors, and board composition decisions? We use the unexpected In re Investors Bancorp decision in 2017 by the Delaware Supreme Court, which lowered the...

After decades of declining litigation risk, independent directors of public companies are viewed as effectively immune to personal litigation costs. However, the unexpected In re Investors Bancorp decision by the Delaware Supreme Court in 2017 lowered the liability threshold only for directors...

In a hand-coded sample of M&A contracts from 2007-08, risk allocation provisions exhibit wide variation. Earn-outs are the least common means to allocate risk, indemnities are most common, followed by price adjustment clauses. Techniques for mitigating enforcement costs – escrows, holdbacks,...

While prior studies generally support that equity-based compensation induces CEOs to manipulate financial reporting, there is little direct empirical evidence on how concerns regarding financial misreporting affect compensation design. Exploiting the exogenous reduction in litigation threat...

This study, through empirical evidence of 3,081 US firms during the period of 1992-2009, shows a strong causal relation between different CEO compensation components and firms' investment policy and firm risk. Specifically, the proportion of CEO option-based compensation is positively and...

This paper examines the incentive provision when the agent can respond to risk by exerting effort to collect information about the underlying state and making corresponding decisions. Such effort is shown to be more valuable in a riskier environment and incentives can increase with...

I investigate the consequences of executive stock option (ESO) risk incentives on risk-taking and future stock returns, conditional on past firm performance. Prior research documents a positive relation between compensation convexity (captured by “vega,” the sensitivity of CEO wealth to...

We examine the issue of auditor independence in a unique setting. Specifically, we test for auditor independence impairment among (1) private client firms, for which the risk of auditor reputation loss is lower than for publicly traded firms, and (2) in a low litigation environment (i.e.,...