CEOs are “lucky” when they receive stock option grants on days when the stock price is the lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing. Extending the work of Bebchuk, Grinstein, Peyer (2010), we explore the effect of overall corporate governance quality on CEO luck....

We use agency theory to investigate the influence of CEO dominance on variation in capital structure. Due to agency conflicts, managers may not always adopt leverage choices that maximize shareholders' value. Consistent with the prediction of agency theory, the evidence reveals that, when the...

Motivated by agency theory, we investigate the effect of board size on corporate outcomes. To address endogeneity, we exploit the variations in the director-age populations across the states in the U.S. We argue that firms with access to a larger pool of potential directors tend to have larger...

Prior research shows that firms tend to recruit directors from the geographically-proximate area. Due to a limited supply of qualified individuals in a given area, firms located in close proximity have to share a limited pool of talented individuals. As a result, the larger the number of firms...