We re-examine prior studies' findings concerning the effects of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) on properties of US firms' information environments. Our study's innovation is the identification of a sample of industry- and size-matched foreign listed firms (ADRs) explicitly exempt from the...

This dissertation contains three essays concerning two broad areas, namely, optimal capital structure and risky assets modeling. In the first paper, we study corporate debt values, capital structure, and the term structure of interest rates in a unified framework. We employ numerical techniques...

We empirically examine two competing claims: first, if a firm's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity is driven by its CEO's private rent extraction (i.e. an agency problem), firms with higher CSR ratings are poorly governed and their managers are less likely to be dismissed for poor...

The international financial reporting literature identifies a multitude of country attributes that each appear to explain financial reporting differences around the world. We first show that a single underlying factor explains across-country variation in 6 reporting quality measures used in the...

We examine relations between board size, managerial incentives and enterprise performance in nonprofit organizations. We posit that a nonprofit's demand for directors increases in the number of programs it pursues, resulting in a positive association between program diversity and board size....

We study the impact of the size of a firm's board of directors on managerial incentives. We present a model where a risk-averse agent (the top management team) performs multiple tasks for a firm that is controlled by multiple principals (the board of directors) who differ in the relative value...

We examine a firm's choice of a measurement system designed to serve two distinct objectives; provide forward-looking information about future firm productivity and ex post information about past managerial performance. A firm can have two separate measurements, one for each purpose, or a single...

This paper studies the role of performance standards in executive annual bonus plans. We find that earned bonuses exceed pre-determined target bonuses (on average), implying that standards do not reflect performance expectations in a statistical sense. We also find that target bonuses are...