This paper estimates the effects of Say-on-Pay (SoP); a policy that increases shareholder "voice" by providing shareholders with a regular vote on executive pay. We apply a regression discontinuity design to the votes on shareholder-sponsored SoP proposals. Adopting SoP leads to large increases...

This paper develops a theory of the opening and dynamic development of a futures market with competing exchanges. The optimal contract design involves a trade-o¤ between the hedging potential of a contract and it?s degree of substitution with competing contracts. As design costs go down slowly,...

In this paper we survey the theoretical and empirical literature on market liquidity. We organize both literatures around three basic questions: (a) how to measure illiquidity, (b) how illiquidity relates to underlying market imperfections and other asset characteristics, and (c) how illiquidity...

In many bilateral transactions, the seller fears being underpaid because its outside option is better known to the buyer. We rationalize a variety of observed contracts as solutions to such smart buyer problems. The key to these solutions is to grant the seller upside participation. In contrast,...

Private equity sponsors pay special attention to designing capital structure, making buyouts an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. In a detailed international sample of buyouts, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to factors that drive public firm leverage, such...

Using data from 1983 to 2010, we propose a new fear measure for Treasury markets, akin to the VIX for equities, labeled TIV. We show that TIV explains one third of the time variation in fund- ing liquidity and that the spread between the VIX and TIV captures flight to quality. We then construct...

We use a comparative approach to study the incentives provided by dierent types of compensation contracts, and their valuation by risk averse managers, in a fairly general setting. We show that concave contracts tend to provide more incentives to risk averse managers, while convex contracts tend...

This paper explores the trading incentives of financial institutions induced by the interaction between regulatory accounting rules and capital requirements by investigating insurance companies’ trading behavior during the recent financial crisis. According to insurance regulation, life...

The paper presents a theory of optimal transparency in the nancial system when nancial institutions have short-term liabilities and are exposed to rollover risk. Our analysis indicates that transparency enhances the stability of the - nancial system during crises but may have a destabilizing...

We study the unique governance dynamics surrounding family ownership in a voluntary regulatory arena where we can directly observe the impact of firm ownership on corporate governance practices pertaining to the composition of the board of directors. We find that family firms are more likely to...