We survey the empirical literature on disproportional ownership, i.e. the use of mechanisms that separate voting rights from cash flow rights in corporations. Our focus is mostly on explicit mechanisms that allow some shareholders to acquire control with less than proportional economic interest...

We analyze the consequences of the board's dual role as advisor as well as monitor of management. Given this dual role, the CEO faces a trade-off in disclosing information to the board: If he reveals his information, he receives better advice; however, an informed board will also monitor him more...

Executives can only impact firm outcomes if they have influence over crucial decisions. Based on this idea we develop and test the hypothesis that firms whose CEOs have more decision-making power should experience more variability in performance. We construct proxies for the CEO's power to...

Profit-maximizing firms should fill job positions at the lowest possible cost. Because employees may have preferences over the attributes of their jobs, we can view this problem as one of finding the optimal way to sell job attributes to potential employees. In this paper, we characterize the...

The noncentral gamma distribution can be viewed as a generalization of the noncentral chi-squared distribution and it can be expressed as a mixture of a Poisson density function with a incomplete gamma function. The noncentral gamma distribution is not available in free conventional statistical...

We develop and test the hypothesis that private information incorporated into stock prices affects the structure of corporate boards. Stock price informativeness may be a complement to board monitoring, because the information revealed by prices can be used by directors to monitor management....

Although some argue that tokenism drives the selection of female directors, we show that they have a significant impact on measures of board effectiveness. In a large panel of data on publicly-traded firms from 1996-2003, we find that (1) the likelihood that a female director has attendance...

Many corporations reward their outside directors with a modest fee for each board meeting they attend. Using two non-overlapping data sets on director attendance behavior, we provide robust evidence that directors are less likely to have attendance problems at board meetings when board meeting...

We survey the empirical literature on disproportional ownership, i.e. the use of mechanisms that separate voting rights from cash flow rights in corporations. Our focus is mostly on explicit mechanisms that allow some shareholders to acquire control with less than proportional economic interest...

It is widely believed that call options induce risk-taking behavior. However, Ross (2004) challenges this intuition by demonstrating the impossibility of inducing managers with arbitrary preferences to always act as if they were less risk averse. If preferences and price distributions are...