This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Hermalin and Weisbach (2003) survey. The two questions most asked about boards are what determines their makeup and what determines their actions? These questions are...

This article considers the consequence of incomplete contracts that arise due to difficulties in precisely describing potentially relevant contingencies. Unlike much of the literature, this article concludes that the resulting incompleteness could often be immaterial with respect to economic...

We examine situations in which a party must make a sunk investment prior to contracting with a second party to purchase an essential complementary input. We study how the resulting hold-up problem is affected by the seller's information about the investing party's likely returns from its...

This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Hermalin and Weisbach (2003) survey. The two questions most asked about boards are what determines their makeup and what determines their actions? These questions are...

By a well-known argument, securities holders do not directly benefit from risk-reducing corporate diversification when they can replicate this diversification on their own. Some have argued that corporate diversification may be of value, or can otherwise be explained by, the agency relationship...

This article asks which wrong doings should be considered criminal and which should be handled in some different manner. The answer is that when the state's commitment power is needed to provide deterrence, a wrong doing should be considered criminal. When, however, private parties can take...

We consider legal rules that determine the price at which minority shareholders can be excluded from the corporate enterprise after a change in control. These rules affect investment after such a change as well as the probability of the change itself. Our principal results are that minority...