This paper examines the impact of independent director busyness on firm value in a setting that addresses a key challenge that the board of directors is an endogenously determined institution. We use the deaths of directors and CEOs as a natural experiment to generate exogenous variation in the...

This paper examines the labor market for CEOs in the financial sector from 1988 to 2007, using a new hand-collected sample of 1,655 CEO successions. We document that there is a significant role of outside successions, as about one out of two successions involves an outside hire. In addition,...

This paper develops a competitive equilibrium model of CEO compensation and industry dynamics. CEOs make product pricing and product improvement decisions subject to shareholders' compensation choices and idiosyncratic shocks to product quality. The choice of high-powered incentives optimally...

This paper studies whether financial contracts exacerbate or mitigate agency conflicts among stakeholders. We consider a specific contractual provision, debt covenants, and examine how, by allocating control rights between shareholders and debtholders, debt covenants affect the employment...

In the decade following the financial crisis of 2008, investment funds in corporate bond markets became prominent market players and generated concerns of financial fragility. The COVID-19 crisis provides an opportunity to inspect their resilience in a major stress event. Using daily microdata,...

In the decade following the financial crisis of 2008, investment funds in corporate bond markets became prominent market players and generated concerns of financial fragility. The COVID-19 crisis provides an opportunity to inspect their resilience in a major stress event. Using daily microdata,...