We empirically investigate the political determinants of liberalization and privatization policies in six network industries of 30 OECD countries (1975–2007). We unbundle liberalization and privatization reforms and study their simultaneous determination in a two-equation model. Unlike...

Efforts to control bank risk address the wrong problem in the wrong way. They presume that the financial crisis was caused by CEOs who failed to supervise risk-taking employees. The responses focus on executive pay, believing that executives will bring non-executives into line - using incentives...

Under the current model of corporate fiduciary law, informational asymmetry between managers and creditors makes the debt contract inadequate to efficiently govern the debtor-creditor relationship. More specifically, as currently devised, the debt contract fails to prevent managerial...

On April 21, 2004, the European Community enacted the XIII Company Law Directive on Takeovers, whose primary purpose is the promotion of more efficient capital structures in Europe. The provision of a Mandatory Bid Rule (MBR) is among the several measures devised by the Directive to achieve this...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>We examine the pricing of both aggregate jump and volatility risk in the cross-section of stock returns by constructing investable option trading strategies that load on one factor but are orthogonal to the other. Both aggregate jump and volatility risk help explain...</p>

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>This paper introduces a new hand-collected data set that tracks restrictions on shareholder rights at approximately 1,000 firms from 1978 to 1989. In conjunction with the 1990 to 2006 IRRC data, we track shareholder rights over 30 years. Most governance changes occurred...</p>

Prices of equity index put options contain information on the price of systematic downward jump risk. We use a structural jump-diffusion firm value model to assess the level of credit spreads that is generated by option-implied jump risk premia. In our compound option pricing model, an equity...

This paper applies the methodology of Bai and Ng (2002, 2004) for decomposing large panel data into systematic and idiosyncratic components to both returns and turnover. Combining the methodology with a generalized-least-squares-based principal components procedure, we demonstrate that this...

We investigate the relationship between CEO centrality -- the relative importance of the CEO within the top executive team in terms of ability, contribution, or power -- and the value and behavior of public firms. Our proxy for CEO centrality is the fraction of the top-five compensation captured...