This paper explains the continuing success of European cooperative banks through evolving comparative advantages. It points out that a cooperative is built around an intergenerational endowment without final owners, which creates particular governance challenges. Risks include the use of the...

Firms often give away free goods with the product that they sell. Firms often give stock options to their top management and other employees. Mixing these two practices-giving stock options to consumers who buy the firm's product-, creates a deadly brew. Large numbers of consumers can be lured...

We investigate the association of various firm-specific and market-wide factors with the riskneutral skewness (RNS) implied by the prices of individual stock options. Our analysis covers 149 U.S. firms over a four-year period. Our choice of firms is based on adequate liquidity and trading...

This thesis comprises three studies on CEO compensation in the UK. It specifically examines the role of CEO defined-benefit pensions, compensation consultants and CEO stock options.Firstly, research on the role of executive pensions is still at a stage of infancy due to data difficulties...

This paper examines the forces driving the adoption of an accounting practice, stock option expensing (SOE), among the Fortune 500 in the wake of the recent corporate scandals. I argue that in the ensuing debates and challenges to the legitimacy of existing institutional frameworks governing...

This dissertation explores the ways in which institutional organizational theory can enhance our understanding of how organizational structures that shape social inequality emerge, diffuse, and persist over time. More specifically, in three distinct papers, I examine the institutionalization of...

In 2003, both the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ enacted changes to the requirements regarding listed companies and their Board of Directors composition. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of those changes, specifically in relation to CEO compensation and compensation...

Purpose - We investigate the stock option disclosures of directors and the five most highly remunerated officers in the directors' report of Australian companies for the years 2000 and 2002 and the choice to position these disclosures in the notes to the financial statements as opposed to the...

We introduce uncertainty into Holmstrom and Milgrom (1987) to study optimal long-term contracting with learning. In a dynamic relationship, the agent's shirking not only reduces current performance but also increases the agent's information rent due to the persistent belief manipulation effect....

In recent years stock option plans (SOPs) have become an important component of managerial remuneration in most industrialized countries. Commonly accepted, corporate as well as individual taxes have a major impact on the costs of a SOP. In contrast, the tax influence on the benefits of a SOP...