Traditional theories argue that governance is strongest under a single large blockholder, as she has large incentives to undertake value-enhancing interventions. However, most firms are held by multiple small blockholders. This paper shows that, while such a structure generates free-rider...

This paper studies performance-sensitive debt (PSD), the class of debt obligations whose interest payments depend on some measure of the borrowers performance. We demonstrate that the existence of PSD obligations cannot be explained by the trade-off theory of capital structure, as PSD leads to...

Previous research in economics shows that compensation based on the pay-for-performance principle is effective in inducing higher levels of effort and productivity. On the other hand, research in psychology argues that performance-based financial incentives inhibit creativity and innovation. How...

Motivating innovation is an important concern in many incentive problems. For example, shareholders of large corporations often need to motivate managers to pursue more innovative business strategies. This paper shows that the optimal incentive scheme that motivates innovation exhibits...

We investigate the strategic role of a recommender who cares about accuracy and whose recommendations influence product quality. In the presence of such feedback effects, recommendations have a self-fulling property: the recommendation agent can select any firm which will end up being the firm...

Since debt is typically riskier in recessions, transfers from equity holders to debt holders associated with each investment also tend to concentrate in recessions. Such systematic risk exposure of debt overhang has important implications for the investment and financing decisions of firms and...

Previous studies have argued that entrepreneurs earn less and bear more risk than salaried workers with otherwise similar characteristics. In a simple model of entrepreneurship, I show that estimates of mean and variance of returns to entrepreneurship used by these previous studies are biased,...