This study uses the 2008 mortgage crisis to demonstrate how the relationship between vertical integration and performance crucially depends on corporate governance. Prior research has argued that the vertical integration of mortgage origination and securitization aligned divisional incentives...

The principal management theoretical lenses for examining leveraged buyouts have been the agency theory and information asymmetries. Occasionally a wider number of theories and concepts have been invoked, such as the parenting advantage, the resource-based view, and the market for corporate...

Economic models routinely assume firms maximize shareholder wealth; however common law legal systems only require that officers and directors pursue the interests of the corporation, leaving this ill-defined. Economic arguments for shareholder wealth maximization derived from shareholders'...

This book contains eight articles written (six with co-authors who are noted at the beginning of the relevant chapters) over the past 30 years addressing various aspects of the Theory of the Firm. These articles emanated from our desire to understand more thoroughly the forces pushing firms to...

Corporate governance scholarship is awash with theories of the firm: these are "stories" or metaphors that try to shed light on the nature and purpose of the firm as an institution and on one or more of the following questions: (i) how the institution of the firm "evolved" (or its economic or...

This chapter provides a critical review and survey of aspects of formal and informal contracting particularly relevant to the study of corporate governance. Two types of modeling, hidden-information agency and informal (relational) contracting that are perhaps under-utilized in governance...

Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting “insufficient” loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty – people undergoing a...

We analyse the effect of equity-based incentives in a supply chain with a downstream firm and an upstream supplier. By using the operational decision as a signal to influence external investors’ beliefs, the downstream firm’s manager intends to maximize a convex combination of the interim...

In this chapter we study dynamic incentive models in which risk sharing is endogenously limited by the presence of informational or enforcement frictions. We comprehensively overview one of the most important tools for the analysis such problems—the theory of recursive contracts. Recursive...