We examine the director labor market to better understand which director attributes are important for board service. We find that general skills and director connections are valued in the market for directors in that both increase the likelihood of individuals gaining a board seat. Among...

Relationships play a central role across the spectrum of real estate transactions. Whether negotiating prices, securing funding, or acquiring permits, knowing the right people provides multiple channels to facilitate deal making. To better understand the role of relationships in real estate...

We explore how property rights protections across different regions in China affect the flow of proprietary information and managers' incentives to disclose details of financial and operating performance. Our focus on research and development spillovers as a proxy for information leakages to...

We use events related to a proxy access rule passed by the SEC in 2010 (but never implemented) as natural experiments to study the valuation effects of exogenous changes in the degree of shareholder control. We find that increases (decreases) in perceived control have positive (negative)...

We document that backfilling in the ExecuComp database introduces a data-conditioning bias that can affect inferences and make replication of previous work difficult. Although backfilling can be advantageous due to greater data coverage, if not addressed the over-sampling of firms with strong...

Many executives have compensation that is potentially forfeit conditioned on the circumstances surrounding their departure from the firm. We study firms' endogenous decisions to use such compensation "holdbacks" as a bonding device and find that firms with higher executive replacement costs,...

We examine the relation between corporate governance and ownership structure, focusing on the role of institutional investors. In many countries, institutional investors have become dominant players in the financial markets. We discuss the theoretical basis for, history of, and empirical...

Proxy advisory firms and large passive mutual funds have faced criticism both for being too powerful and not exercising diligence in proxy voting. We document that the ``Big 3'' passive fund families, Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard, are increasingly likely to vote with management, and...

Corporate governance constitutes the internal and external institutions, markets, policies, and processes designed to help companies maximize their efficiency and value. In this collection of classic and current articles from the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, thought leaders such as...

We examine the relation between corporate governance and ownership structure, focusing on the role of institutional investors. In many countries, institutional investors have become dominant players in the financial markets. We discuss the theoretical basis for, history of, and empirical...