We present evidence that individuals make political contributions strategically by targeting politicians with power to affect their economic well-being. Individuals in Congressional districts with greater industry clustering choose to support politicians with jurisdiction over the industry....

Although recent research documents a positive relation between corporate transparency and the proportion of independent directors, the direction of causality is unclear. We examine a regulatory shock that substantially increased board independence for some firms, and find that information...

This paper shows that proxy contests have a significant adverse effect on careers of incumbent directors. Following a proxy contest, directors experience a significant decline in the number of directorships not only in the targeted company, but also in other nontargeted companies. The results...

We investigate changes to the ownership and control of East Asia's largest companies in 1996 and 2008. Newly compiled data for 1386 publicly traded companies at the end of 2008 are supplemented with existing data on 1,606 publicly traded companies at the end of 1996. Two main findings stand out....

Outside directors and audit committees are widely considered to be central elements of good corporate governance. We use a 1999 Korean law as an exogenous shock to assess whether and how board structure affects firm market value. The law mandates 50% outside directors and an audit committee for...

We provide new evidence on the relation between option-based compensation and risk-taking behavior by exploiting the change in the accounting treatment of stock options following the adoption of FAS 123R in 2005. The implementation of FAS 123R represents an exogenous change in the accounting...

We use exogenous changes in Danish local municipality sizes to identify a large positive effect of political power on the profitability of firms related by family to local politicians. Our difference-in-differences estimate is consistent with a unitary elasticity of connected firms’...

We use a unique data set that contains information on more than 1,000 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) around the world to investigate the degree to which executives delegate financial decisions and the circumstances that drive variation in delegation....

We study reputation incentives in the director labor market and find that directors with multiple directorships distribute their effort unequally based on the directorship's relative prestige. When directors experience an exogenous increase in a directorship's relative ranking, their board...

We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure-related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their reelection to express displeasure over the directors’...