We examine the relation between managers' personal income tax rates and their corporate investment decisions. Using plausibly exogenous variation in federal and state tax rates, we find a positive relation between managers' personal tax rates and their corporate risk-taking. Moreover — and...

Standard principal-agent models commonly invoked to explain executive pay practices do not account for the involvement of third-party intermediaries in the CEO labor market. This paper investigates the influence of one such intermediary – talent agents who seek out prospective employers and...

While the shareholder benefits of investor conferences are well-documented, evidence on whether these conferences facilitate managerial opportunism is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether managers opportunistically exploit heightened attention around the conference to “hype” the stock....

Prior turnover literature documents that poor performance leads a board of directors to terminate the CEO, but does not explore the underlying causes of the CEO's poor performance. Recognizing that terminated CEOs have often been successful earlier in their tenure, we conjecture that changes in...