This paper studies the relationship between investor protection, financial risk sharing and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, better protection makes investors more willing to take on entrepreneurial risk while lending to firms. This implies lower cost of external finance...

Most US credit card holders revolve high-interest debt, often combined with substantial (i) asset accumulation by retirement, and (ii) low-rate liquid assets. Hyperbolic discounting can resolve only the former puzzle (Laibson et al., 2003). Bertaut and Haliassos (2002) proposed an...

This paper studies the relationship between investor protection, the development of financial markets and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, investor protection promotes financial development by raising confidence and reducing the costs of external financing. Developed...

This study empirically evaluates the impact of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) and the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 upon the (equity) risk of the largest US firms, the backbone of the US economy. Drawing from the literature, hypotheses are developed and empirically...

The purpose of this paper is to set out the Enron's demise into the perspective of Corporate and Global Governance. To accomplish this target, the incremental cash flow model is expanded to give room for governance issues, while a functional introduction to information sets is developed,...

In recent years, increasing attention has focused on the influence of gender and racial diversity on boards of directors. Sixteen countries now require quotas to increase women's representation on boards, and many more have voluntary quotas in corporate governance codes. In the United States,...

We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their re-election to express displeasure over the directors'...

A good corporate governance framework should combine transparency, accountability and integrity and this requires knowledge of beneficial ownership. The protection of minority investors and other stakeholder protection will be challenging without access to reliable information about the...

Investor confidence in financial markets depends in large part on the existence of an accurate disclosure regime that provides transparency in the beneficial ownership and control structures of publicly listed companies. This is particularly true for corporate governance systems that are...

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court...