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 explores the hypothesis that the rise in intangible capital is a fundamental driver of the secular trend in US corporate cash holdings over the last decades. Using a new measure,we show that intangible capital is the most important firm-level determinant of corporate cash holdings....

We use the deaths of directors and chief executive officers as a natural experiment to generate exogenous variation in the time and resources available to independent directors at interlocked firms. The loss of such key co-employees is an attention shock because it increases the board committee...

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...

Competitive sorting models of the CEO labor market (e.g., Edmans, Gabaix and Landier (2009)) predict that differences in CEO productive abilities, or "talent", should be an important determinant of CEO pay. However, measuring CEO talent empirically represents a major challenge. In this paper, we...

Using a regression discontinuity design, we provide evidence that incentive conflicts between firms and their creditors have a large impact on employees. There are sharp and substantial employment cuts following loan covenant violations, when creditors exercise their ex post control rights. The...

This paper uses the staggered changes of R&D tax credits across U.S. states and over time as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact of innovation on corporate liquidity. By generating plausibly independent variation in firms' incentive to invest in R&D, we are able to assess the...

Department: Economics.