This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on executive compensation. We start by presenting data on the level of CEO and other top executive pay over time and across firms, the changing composition of pay; and the strength of executive incentives. We compare pay in U.S. public...

Pragmatic and effective research on corporate governance often turns critically on appreciating the legal institutions surrounding corporate entities—yet such nuances are often unfamiliar or poorly specified to economists and other social scientists without legal training. This chapter...

Boards of directors are intellectually interesting; the literature on boards has academic impact and there is substantial scope for this literature to have policy impact. I illustrate these points by combining a select review of the literature with evidence from a variety of data sets. Boards...

We review historical and current research on mergers and acquisitions. The literature is extensive. After a discussion of earlier survey articles (our “survey of the surveys”), we provide a review of more than 120 M&A related-articles published in leading finance journals since 2011. A basic...

This chapter documents the evolution of ownership and control of firms around the world over a hundred year period from the beginning of the 20th century to today. It records the substantial changes that have taken place in the nature of stock markets and contrasts these with the persistent...

Economic models routinely assume firms maximize shareholder wealth; however common law legal systems only require that officers and directors pursue the interests of the corporation, leaving this ill-defined. Economic arguments for shareholder wealth maximization derived from shareholders'...

This chapter provides a critical review and survey of aspects of formal and informal contracting particularly relevant to the study of corporate governance. Two types of modeling, hidden-information agency and informal (relational) contracting that are perhaps under-utilized in governance...