Although examples of deception and fraud in business have generated widespread interest in themotivations for honest behavior, little is known about individual differences in the propensity totell the truth. This paper highlights the role of honesty as a protected value, maintaining thatsome...

There are people who are motivated by the non-selfish, non-strategic, and non-consequentialist“protected value” of truthfulness. We conduct an experiment directly assessing thisphenomenon. We find that people differ substantially in their truthfulness, with a largeminority powerfully...

Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

This paper is the rst to empirically analyze the value to shareholders of the power to havea binding vote on management pay. We nd that in response to an unanticipated eventthat made it likely that an annual binding vote would become compulsory for Swiss publiccompanies, the apparent immediate...

This paper develops a structural equilibrium model with intertemporal macroeconomic risk, in-corporating the fact that ¯rms are heterogeneous in their asset composition. Compared to ¯rmswhich are mainly composed of invested assets, ¯rms with growth options have larger costs ofdebt because...

This paper investigates the extent to which voluntary disclosure quality (VDQ) of firms isreflected in equity prices. In environments where we expect informational efficiency to behigh, VDQ is not associated with returns beyond those available through passively investingin popular styles, and a...

This paper studies the extent to which risk-taking incentives of CEOs and other governancefeatures in a range of years prior to the recent financial crisis were related to the write-downsof U.S. financial institutions during the crisis. We document that institutions whose CEOs hadparticularly...

This paper summarizes the short selling restrictions adopted—mainly on anemergency basis—in the time period of July 2008 up to mid-June 2010 in 56countries around the world. It is a supplement to a recent article of theauthors (Gruenewald et al., 2010) and gives a detailed overview of...

This paper analyzes the independence of boards of directors as an optimally chosen, non-contractible behavior. A board behaves loyally to a CEO when it agrees to a negative NPV-pro ject, giving the CEO private benefits. While the CEO benefitsfrom competent directors because they help him make...

An agent shows loyalty to his manager by bearing personal costs to the superiors benefit. In return, the manager may offer various forms of rewards. If this exchange is not contractible, typically repeated interaction will be required to sustain it. Beyond loyalty, the manager is interested in...