This paper studies the governance of a sample of California hospitals. We document a number of empirical relations about hospital governance: The composition of the board of directors varies systematically across ownership types; poor performance and high administrative costs increase board...

This paper studies the governance of a sample of California hospitals. We find a number of empirical relations about hospital governance: The composition of the board of directors varies systematically across ownership types; poor performance and high administrative costs increase board...

Firms undertake a variety of actions to reduce risk through diversification, including entering diverse lines of business, taking on project partners, and maintaining portfolios of risky projects such as Ramp;D or natural resource exploration. By a well-known argument, securities holders do not...

This is a draft of a chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Corporate Culture. It surveys some of the existing literature on the economics of corporate culture and discusses how the existing literature on the economics of organization can be tied to research on corporate culture or given a...

Previous empirical analyses of the relationship between executive compensation and firm performance are often interpreted as suggesting that this relationship is weak. Although an absolute term like quot;weakquot; is ambiguous in this context, relative terms, such as quot;stronger,quot; are...

This paper studies the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can holdup the agent,...

Introduction: the study of corporate governance / Benjamin E. Hermalin, Michael S. Weisbach -- Aspects of the economics of organization with application to corporate governance / Benjamin E. Hermalin -- Assessing managerial ability: implications for corporate governance / Benjamin E. Hermalin,...

This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Hermalin and Weisbach (2003) survey. The two questions most asked about boards are what determines their makeup and what determines their actions? These questions are...

An objective of many proposed corporate governance reforms is increased transparency. This goal has been relatively uncontroversial, as most observers believe increased transparency to be unambiguously good. We argue that, from a corporate governance perspective, there are likely to be both...