Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

This paper summarizes the short selling restrictions adopted—mainly on anemergency basis—in the time period of July 2008 up to mid-June 2010 in 56countries around the world. It is a supplement to a recent article of theauthors (Gruenewald et al., 2010) and gives a detailed overview of...

This paper analyzes the independence of boards of directors as an optimally chosen, non-contractible behavior. A board behaves loyally to a CEO when it agrees to a negative NPV-pro ject, giving the CEO private benefits. While the CEO benefitsfrom competent directors because they help him make...

An agent shows loyalty to his manager by bearing personal costs to the superiors benefit. In return, the manager may offer various forms of rewards. If this exchange is not contractible, typically repeated interaction will be required to sustain it. Beyond loyalty, the manager is interested in...

Recent organizational theories suggest that there is a tradeoff between loyalty and competence. This paper tests several such theories in the context of public agencies. Prime ministers, chancellors, and kings alike need to secure the (efficient or inefficient) loyalty of their agencies, such as...

CEO compensation has increased substantially over the past 15 years, but so has forcedturnover. Motivated by this observation, we investigate whether part of the developmentof CEO pay can be explained by a premium which compensates CEOs for increased job risk.We ¯nd that for the CEOs of the...

This paper analyzes board independence and competence as distinct, but inextricably linked aspects of board effectiveness. Competent directors add shareholder value because they have better information about the quality of projects. While a CEO cares about shareholder value, he also wants his...

Competent public agencies are associated with better economic outcomes. Beyond competence, political leaders need to secure the loyalty of their agencies. Unfortunately, several theories predict a tradeoff between these two valued features. This paper finds that recruitment into agencies is...