This paper analyzes the determinants of the German corporate governance rating recently developed by Drobetz, Schillhofer, and Zimmermann (2004). We find a non- linear relationship between ownership concentration and the quality of firmlevel corporate governance as measured by the rating. Firms...

This paper analyzes the determinants of governance transparency. In our model, entrepreneurs optimally decide the precision of their earning reporting by trading off the possibility of expropriating profits against the capacity to attract external funding.We find that information is only...

The informativeness principle demonstrates that a contract should depend on informative signals. This paper studies how it should do so. Signals that indicate the output distribution has shifted to the left (e.g. weak industry performance) reduce the threshold for the manager to be paid; those...

We develop a model that endogenizes the manager's choice of firm risk and of inside debt investment strategy. Our model delivers two predictions. First, managers have an incentive to reduce the correlation between inside debt and company stock in bad times. Second, managers that reduce such a...

Analyzing data from approximately 1.5 million employees across 1,108 established public and private US companies, we find that employee beliefs about their firm's purpose is weaker in public companies. This difference is most pronounced within the salaried middle and hourly ranks, rather than...