This paper narrates a biblical story - Eve's ingestion of the forbidden fruit - and analogizes it to a recent business law story that I explore in my scholarship and use in my teaching - Martha Stewart's sale of ImClone stock as alleged insider trading. The analogy, while imperfect, helps expose...

The subprime crisis led to a wave of government interventions in the private sector that has been particularly strong in Europe and Latin America, where several governments are large shareholders in a variety of public firms. In a sense, the subprime crisis induced these governments to behave as...

We analyze the relationship between board-level codetermination and shareholder value. We use a unique dataset of listed German companies that enables us to identify heterogeneous aspects of codetermination and overcome otherwise common identification issues. We find that codetermination reduces...

This thesis comprises four empirical research papers in the area of political economics. While the first two chapters deal with questions related to direct democracy, chapters three and four are about topics linked to representative democracy.

Members of parliament in many countries are legally permitted to execute (un)paid jobs in addition to their political mandate. It is often argued that such "moonlighting" activities are unproblematic for the chain of democratic delegation and accountability as long as outside interests/earnings...