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...

Using aggregated facility-level toxic release data, we estimate the relation of pollution and short interest in the US between 1987 and 2017. Our findings suggest that short interest is significantly higher in polluting firms’ stocks, and that this relation is not an artifact of economic...

We examine the relation between chief executive officer (CEO) sensation seeking, which captures the desire for varied, novel, and complex personal sensations and experiences, and corporate debt contracting. Using pilot certificates as a proxy for the personality trait of sensation seeking, we...

We develop a model to show how agency conflicts, free rider effects and monitoring costs interact to affect optimal team size and workers' incentive contracts. Team size increases with project risk, decreases with profitability, and decreases with monitoring costs as a proportion of output. Our...