Mark Hurd resigned as the CEO of Hewlett Packard in 2010 after the board discovered that he had misfiled expense reports and paid an H.P. contractor for unsubstantiated work. After Hurd left H.P., he joined Oracle, an H.P. competitor. Soon thereafter, the H.P. board appointed a new CEO following...

In Closer Look, we highlight significant “holes” in our knowledge of corporate governance. These are central issues where insufficient or inadequate study has left us unable to answer basic questions, and where key assumptions relied upon by experts have not been verified or validated. While...

We study a model of "information-based entrenchment" in which the CEO has private information that the board needs to make an efficient replacement decision. Eliciting the CEO's private information is costly, as it implies that the board must pay the CEO both higher severance pay and higher...