A significant and growing percentage of U.S. firms now have boards where the CEO is the only employee director (i.e., fully independent boards). This paper studies whether and how this practice impacts board effectiveness. I find that fully independent boards are associated with a significant...

We examine the relation between layoffs and stockholders' wealth, and corporate performance subsequent to layoffs. We find that layoffs are preceded by a period of poor stock market and earnings performance, and are followed by significant improvements in both. On average, layoff announcements...

This paper provides risk and information asymmetry-based explanations of the disappearing dividend puzzle first documented by Fama and French (2001). Dividends serve as signaling device and, under models of dividend signaling under information asymmetry, the cost of signaling increases with...

Arguments for eliminating the double taxation of dividends apply only to dividends paid by corporations to individuals. The double (and multiple) taxation of dividends paid by one firm to another intercorporate dividends - was explicitly included in the 1930s to eliminate pyramidal corporate...

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...