General George C. Marshall is universally recognized as a paragon of leadership. Marshall’s effectiveness as the leader of the U.S. Army during World War II, the State Department during the early post-war era, and the Defense Department during the Korean War are well known and documented. As a...

Using an event study approach, we seek to estimate the market value investors placed on Steve Jobs by investigating the stock market reactions to his death. In the three-day window surrounding his death, the estimated cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) are -5.76%. Given the market capitalization...

The quiet life hypothesis posits that entrenched managers are well-insulated from removal and thus prefer to enjoy a quiet life, i.e. they tend to be less ambitious, avoid difficult decisions, and engage in less risk-taking (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2003). We utilize the staggered board (or...

We show that a firm's CSR policy is significantly influenced by the CSR policies of firms in the same 3-digit zip code, an effect possibly due to investor clienteles, local competition, and/or social interactions. We then exploit the variation in CSR across the zip codes to estimate the effect...

Prior research shows that powerful CEOs can exacerbate the agency conflict, resulting in adverse corporate outcomes. Exploiting an exogenous shock introduced by the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, we explore whether board independence mitigates CEO power. Based on difference-in-difference...

CEOs are “lucky” when they receive stock option grants on days when the stock price is the lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing (Bebchuk, Grinstein, and Peyer, 2010). We extend Bebchuk et al. (2010) by investigating the geographic peer effects of CEO luck. Our...

CEOs are “lucky” when they are granted stock options on days when the stock price is lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing and severe agency problems (Bebchuck, Grinstein, and Peyer, 2010). Using idiosyncratic volatility as our measure of stock price...