Relative pay in the financial sector has experienced an extraordinary increase over the last few decades. A proposed explanation for this pattern has been that the demand for skilled workers in finance has risen more than in other sectors. We use Swedish administrative data, which include...

We show that country characteristics explain most of the cross-sectional variation in bank board independence. In contrast, country characteristics have little explanatory power for the fraction of outside bank directors with experience in the banking industry. Exploiting the time-series...

We show that long-term compensation is associated with higher pay in the financial industry and the legal sector. Then, using a detailed survey of law school graduates, we explore why firms use long-term compensation. We find that individuals with jobs that make them highly visible and that...

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in timing their trades and engaging in stealth trading, e.g., by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements were...

We show that close votes on shareholder proposals are disproportionately more likely to be won by management than by shareholder activists. Using a sample of shareholder proposals from 2003 to 2016, we uncover a large and discontinuous drop in the density of voting results at the 50% threshold....

Financial sector wages increased extraordinarily over the last decades. An explanation for this trend is that skill demand rose more in finance than other sectors. We use Swedish administrative data, which include cognitive and non-cognitive ability, as well as U.S. data, to examine talent...

Financial sector wages have increased extraordinarily over the last decades. We address two potential explanations for this increase: (1) rising demand for talent and (2) firms sharing rents with their employees. Matching administrative data of Swedish workers, which include unique measures of...

Shareholder votes may create value because they force boards to implement proposals' content or because they signal shareholders' discontent. In order to distinguish these hypotheses, we collect data on the implementation of shareholder proposals. We show that the decision to implement proposals...

This research studies the role of CEOs with a career background in finance. Firms that appoint financial expert CEOs hold less cash and more debt, and engage in more share repurchases. Financial expert CEOs are also more financially sophisticated. They are less likely to use one companywide...

This paper studies the impact of a course in finance for executives of medium and large enterprises on firm policies and performance through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Mozambique. Survey data and accounting data provide consistent evidence that managers change firm financial policies...