Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that interests of labor may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based...

Uncertainty about management appears to affect firms' cost of borrowing and financial policies. In a sample of S&P 1500 firms between 1987 and 2010, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all decline over the first three years of CEO tenure, holding other macroeconomic, firm, and...

Management risk occurs because uncertainty about future managerial decisions increases a firm's overall risk. This paper documents the importance of management risk in determining firms' cost of borrowing. CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all increase at the time of CEO turnover,...

I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee compensation and performance. I next create...

We evaluate whether management risk, coming from uncertainty about management's value added, affects firms' default risks and debt pricing. We find that, regardless of the reason for the turnover, CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all increase at the time of management turnover,...

The paper examines the corporate governance mechanism of the control model (or insider control system) by looking at both the motivation for management to deviate from following their principal's wishes and whether the supervising body, the board of directors would correct them. Some...

This paper documents the existence of a CEO Investment Cycle, in which disinvestment decreases over CEO tenure while investment increases, leading to “cyclical” firm growth in assets as well as in employment. The estimated variation in investment rate over the CEO cycle is of the same order...

I study the optimal choice of investment projects in a continuous time moral hazard model with multitasking. While in the first best, projects are invariably chosen by the net present value (NPV) criterion, moral hazard introduces a cutoff for project execution which depends on both a project's...

When there is uncertainty about a CEO's quality, news about the firm causes rational investors to update their expectation of the firm's value for two reasons: Updates occur because of the direct effect of the news, and also because news leads investors to update their assessment of the CEO's...

When a firm has external debt and monitoring by shareholders is essential, managerial bonuses are shown to be an optimal solution. A small managerial bonus linked to firm's performance not only reduces moral hazard between managers and shareholders, but also between creditors and monitoring...