An underlying assumption in the executive compensation literature is that there is a national labor market for CEOs. The urban economics literature, however, documents higher ability among workers in large metropolitans, which results in a real and stable urban wage premium. In this paper, we...

We augment the LLSV creditor rights index with a new "restructuring index" that measures the incentives provided to creditors to grant concessions outside formal bankruptcy. We study the joint impact of the two indexes on a firm's leverage policy. We show that the two indexes have at most a...

We formulate several testable hypotheses on managerial motivation and test our hypotheses by using a sample of 128 organizational form changes in the real estate industry. We find that firms that switch to a more restrictive (tighter) organizational structure have increases in stock value, and...

This paper surveys the empirical and theoretical literature on the mechanisms of corporate governance. We focus on the internat mechanisms of corporate governance (e.g., arising from conflicts of interests between managers and equityholders, equityholders and creditors, and capital contributors...

This paper investigates the design of privatization mechanisms in emerging market economies characterized by political constraints that limit the set of viable privatization mechanisms. Our objective is to explain the striking diversity of privatization mechanisms observed in practice and the...

Recent empirical work has documented the tendency of corporations to reset strike prices on previously-awarded executive stock option grants when declining stock prices have pushed these options out-of-the-money. This practice has been criticized as counter-productive since it weakens incentives...

This paper does a valuation analysis of senior-subordinated structure tranches backed by non-agency mortgages. The valuation is done using Monte Carlo simulation and employs the CIR interest rate process in conjunction with an empirical model estimated for non-agency mortgage prepayments and...

We study changes in organizational form in the real estate industry based on a sample of 128 changes announced during the period from January 1, 1966 through December 31, 1989. The rich variety of organizational forms of real estate firms with varying degrees of restrictiveness of the equity...