This paper explores corporate politics, governance and value in the S&P 500 before and after Citizens United. In regulated and government-dependent industries (e.g., banking, telecommunications), political activity is nearly universal, and uncorrelated with measures of shareholder power,...

Until late in the twentieth century, internal corporate governance - that is, decision making by the principal constituencies of the firm - was clearly distinct from outside oversight by regulators, auditors and credit rating agencies, and markets. With the 1980s takeover wave and hedge funds'...

This Article reports results of an empirical study that suggests that the current economic crisis has changed managerial behavior in the US in a way that may impede economic recovery. The study finds a strong, statistically significant and economically meaningful, positive correlation between...

Executive compensation in the U.S. banking industry has been criticized as a root cause of the recent financial crisis. This study examines the relationship between executive compensation, ownership structure, and firm performance for Chinese financial corporations during 2001-2009. The results...

We are making the firm-level corporate governance index used in Aggarwal, Erel, Ferreira and Matos (2010) available. The data covers 23 countries for the period 2004-2008. Non-U.S. firms in the sample account for approximately 71% of world market capitalization excluding the U.S.; and U.S. firms...

We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and activist institutional...

During 2008 and 2009 Australian listed entities raised large amounts of equity capital as the global financial crisis led to a significant tightening in credit markets. Over these two years listed entity after listed entity recapitalised, seeking additional equity to replace debt as lenders,...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 1993 to 2007. We find that the level of cash holdings declines as state ownership increases. This negative relation is attributable to the soft-budget constraint (SBC) inherent in state...

We examine whether institutional investors affect corporate governance by analyzing portfolio holdings of institutions in companies from 23 countries during the period 2003-2008. We find that firm-level governance is positively associated with international institutional investment. Changes in...

We examine the implications of regulatory intervention in pay-setting, by studying whether executive compensation restrictions associated with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) influence banks' participation in the program. We find that banks more likely to be impacted by the restrictions...