A rarely studied trend in corporate governance is the increasing tendency to fill CEO openings through external hires rather than through internal promotions: Kevin J. Murphy and Ján Zábojník (2004) show that the proportion of outside hires has doubled and their pay premium almost quadrupled...

Director compensation has become a fashionable topic: Cross-nationally, the earnings of executives and non-executive directors have risen significantly in recent years. Academic literature offers two hypotheses for this trend, a ?fat cat? and an ?optimal-contract? explanation. Proponents of the...

The financial crisis made apparent the fact that managers and the boards of banks had failed to see the implications of irrational behavior and had ignored the risk associated with group think. Taking data from Switzerland our study shows that there is an increasing homogeneity of management and...

The rise in executive compensation has triggered a great amount of public controversy and academic research. Critics have referred to the salaries paid to managers as 'pay without performance', while defenders have countered that the large salaries can be explained by a 'war for talents'. This...

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of...

Does Open Source (OS) represent a new innovation model, and under what conditions can it be employed in other contexts? A look into history shows that OS isn?t a unique example of what is called ?collective invention?. Other examples are blast furnaces in Britain?s Cleveland district, steam...

Research rankings based on publications and citations today dominate governance of academia. Yet they have unintended side effects on individual scholars and academic institutions and can be counterproductive. They induce a substitution of the "taste for science" by a "taste for publication". We...

Corporate scandals are reflected in excessive top management compensation and fraudulent accounts. These scandals cause an enormous amount of damage, not only to the companies affected, but also to the market economy as a whole. As a solution, conventional wisdom suggests more monitoring and...

Academic rankings today are the backbone of research governance, which seem to fit the aims of "new public management" on the one side and the idea of the "republic of science" on the other side. Nevertheless rankings recently came under scrutiny. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of...