This paper studies how the legal liability rules for directors can be optimally designed to provide them with the incentives to fulfill their fiduciary duties and to maximize ex-ante firm value. I present a principal-agent model where the shareholders can obtain a verifiable but costly and...

Traditional American corporation statutes state that the business and affairs of the corporation shall be managed by a board of directors who act as fiduciaries of the corporation. The purpose of this paper is to explain the economic logic underlying the regulation of corporate directors'...

This paper models the process of policy making at the top level of the firm: its board of directors. Directors are expected to both advise and monitor the CEO to ensure that shareholders' wealth is maximized. The more independent directors are the better they will fulfill this fiduciary...

This article analyses the effects of board composition on the behavior of a sample of 114 Italian local public utilities, for which information about 1630 directors during 1994--2004 has been collected. This period is particularly interesting because of the legal changes that forced many firms...

This paper studies empirically the effect of ownership concentration on the risk and performance of commercial banks, controlling for shareholders protection laws, bank regulations, and other country and bank specific traits. The sample used comprises 795 banks of 47 countries, in the period...

This paper investigates minority expropriation problems in closely-held corporations, where control is shared by a small number of blockholders. Using a large sample of Spanish firms for the years 1996 through 2000, we find that firms whose characteristics make them more vulnerable to minority...

This paper focuses on the evolution of violence trends in the three biggest Colombian cities, Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. Two of those cities, Bogotá and Medellín, were able to cut dramatically their homicide rates, while Cali did not. The taming of violence in Bogotá and Medellín...