This is a Chapter contributing to the Research Handbook on Executive Compensation. In the quest for possible causes of the recent financial crisis, commentators often argue that bank executives had poor incentives. Critics claim, in particular, that executive compensation was not properly...

Has there been convergence of corporate governance systems? There has been a great deal of controversy on this issue in the last ten years, and it is likely that this debate is to re-emerge in the context of the current financial crisis. In this paper I use a new quantitative methodology...

Using a large sample of firms from 30 countries, we find that the integration of corporate social responsibility (CSR) criteria into executive compensation is associated with greater innovation output in countries around the world. We also find that this positive association is stronger in...

After the financial crisis, there has been considerable debate about the role of corporations in society. It has become broadly accepted that corporations - particularly the world's largest publicly traded corporations – need to be governed with respect for the society and the environment....

We conduct a large-scale global study of ESG-linked pay for major firms that make up 85% of the market capitalization across 59 countries. We find that the pay adoption is higher for firms in extractive and utility industries, in countries that value individualism and femininity, have stronger...

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...

Using a sample of about 90,000 observations from 38 countries over the 2001-2012 period, we provide three novel findings regarding say on pay (SoP) laws. First, we find robust evidence that SoP laws reduce CEO pay growth rates at firms. Second, such laws decrease the portion of total top...

Investors are increasingly demonstrating a preference for superior ESG performance among their portfolio firms. Concurrently, the use of ESG-related contracting metrics in executive compensation contracts has increased. We investigate these two related issues in the context of the adoption of...

Do workers’ unions promote gender equality? The scholarship in the past thirty years has increasingly questioned the ability of unions to give voice to the needs of all workers, including foreign workers, workers with disabilities, elderly workers, gay and lesbian workers, and women. This...

The first target of today's global commercial and military espionage, trade secrets, are the only form of intellectual property protection to be based on the necessity of nondisclosure and secrecy rather than on the paradigm of publicity and exploitability, with the obvious consequence that...