We study CEOs with a career background in finance. Firms with financial expert CEOs hold less cash, more debt, and engage in more share repurchases. Financial expert CEOs are more financially sophisticated: they are less likely to use one companywide discount rate instead of a project-specific...

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...

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes–Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in strategically timing their trades and SEC filings, 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 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...

In the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley era corporate insiders were required to report trades in shares of their firm until the 10th of the month following the trade. This gave them considerable flexibility to time their trades and reports strategically, e.g., by executing a sequence of trades and reporting...

Strong corporate governance may bear some costs to shareholders when it leads to the departure of value-enhancing CEOs out of disagreement with the board. We test this hypothesis using the passing of shareholder proposals related to anti-takeover provisions in closely contested votes as a...

Strong corporate governance may bear some costs to shareholders when it leads to the departure of value-enhancing CEOs out of disagreement with the board. We test this hypothesis using the passing of shareholder proposals related to anti-takeover provisions in closely contested votes as a...

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...

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...