The phenomenon of family governance in Chinese family businesses may not only signal a high second-party agency cost that infringes on the interests of small and medium shareholders, but it may also signal this as a stable governance structure. Based on the theory of signal transmission, this...

Short-term debt can reduce potential agency conflicts between managers and shareholders by exposing managers to more frequent monitoring by the credit market. Using an international dataset, we examine whether internal monitoring can substitute for external monitoring through the use of...

We study a principal‐agent framework in which the agent forms beliefs about the principal's project based on a misspecified subjective model. She fits this model to the objective probability distribution to predict output under alternative actions. Misspecifications in the subjective model may...

This study sets out a new methodology to exemplify, through a set of risk metrics called the Greeks, impact of a bond’s structured provisions (e.g., call, put, and conversion options) on its risk characteristics and its propensity for agency conflicts. The methodology is assessed by applying...

We analyze a multitasking model with a verifiable routine task and a skill-dependent activity characterized by moral hazard. Contracts negotiated by firm/employee pairs follow from Nash bargaining. High- and low-skilled employees specialize, intermediate productivity employees perform both...

Carbon emissions and agency costs can have an impact on firms’ financial performance. However, limited attention has been paid to the combined and gradual effects of these two factors on firms’ performance. We explore the separate and combined effects of carbon emissions and agency costs on...

Companies typically control various aspects of their workers' behaviors. In this paper, we investigate whether the hierarchical distance of the superior who imposes such control measures matters for the workers' ensuing reaction. In particular, we test, in a laboratory experiment, whether...

When a company establishes subsidiaries with capital provided by a third party, the subsidiaries' shareholders include the parent company (controlling shareholders) and minority (noncontrolling) shareholders. When shareholders' interests are divergent, conflicts may arise, causing inefficiencies...

In this paper I develop a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which features three different types of representative agents (THRANK): the poor hand-to-mouth, the wealthy hand-to-mouth and the non-hand-to mouth households. Compared to a full-scale HANK model, this model is...

Much of corporate managers’ incentive is related to the stock price. Consequently, a firm can design its corporate information environment to tackle its manager’s moral hazard problem. We analyze a model in which the manager needs to exert costly effort to implement a risky, long-term...

We examine the impact of internationalization on IPO underpricing in China. Our findings, which suggest that internationalization can reduce IPO underpricing, echoes similar findings in the literature. However, we document that the transmission channel is not consistent with a diversification...

Our life is built around coordinating efforts with others. This usually involves incentivizing others to do things, and sustaining our relationship with them. Using the wrong incentives backfires: it lowers effort and tarnishes our relationships. But what constitutes a ‘wrong’ incentive? And...

The aim of this paper is to define and isolate the drivers of speculative cash hoarding phenomena in publicly traded non-financial American firms before and after the financial crisis of 2008. The model presented in this paper uses previous literature defined drivers of transaction and...

This paper studies whether greater competition can mitigate agency problems within banks. We measure the intensity of the agency conflict within a bank by the volume of loans that the bank lends to its insiders (e.g., executives). We first check that these loans are a form of private benefit. By...

We develop a model where two players with asymmetric preferences engage in a contest game. The key novelty is the introduction of multi-dimensional rewards. We characterize the optimal prize allocation that maximizes aggregate effort. When heterogeneity in preferences is strong and the designer...

Using founder imprinting literature, we theorize the innovation performance of founder versus agent CEOs. While founder imprinting is a unique mechanism that is exclusively available to founder CEOs, few studies have explored this phenomenon with corporate innovation performance. Previous...

In an earlier work, we analyzed how the legal rules governing contractual liability affect the transfer of information between the parties to the contract. In particular, we showed how limitations on contractual liability might lead high valuation buyers to reveal their valuation of performance,...

This study examines the impact of firm-level managerial delegation on aggregate economy. First, managerial delegation demands skilled labor and hence affects the labor market. Second, managerial delegation also affects the product market by improving production efficiency. Managerial delegation...

Employment relations are well understood. Business format franchising is a newer and rapidlyevolving business expansion formula, also providing employment. This article compares the fatesof employees and franchisees in their employer/franchisor insolvency.Whereas employees enjoyprotection,...

Grounded in the institutional theory and impressive management theory, this study establishes a link between star CEOs and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. We first find that star CEOs are positively related to ESG performance and star CEOs related to the central...

This paper presents a Continuous-Time Hidden Markov Model (CT-HMM) of debt issuers' credit quality dynamics. We observe ratings published by several agencies (e.g., Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Fitch) for one or several issuers (e.g., countries) and assume that we can find a maximum-likelihood...

Using the Business Longitudinal Database compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we examine the level and determinants of agency costs in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with a particular focus on the impact of family ownership and the variation in agency costs associated...

There is continuing uncertainty about whether family firms have lower agency costs. This paper proposes that a combination of family ownership and altruism affects agency costs in family firms. To begin with, family ownership can reduce agency costs through better aligning the interests of...

Canada’s largest banks rely on private developers of regulatory technology (RegTech) to comply with the requirements of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI). RegTech’s algorithms allow banks to organize unstructured data, identify, assess, and mitigate risk, and...

This paper examines the optimal provision of incentives for contract designers. A principal hires an agent to draft a contract that is incomplete because the ex-ante specified design might not be appropriate ex-post. The degree of contract incompleteness is endogenously determined by the effort...

A screening instrument is costly if it is socially wasteful and productive otherwise. A principal screens an agent with multidimensional private information and quasilinear preferences that are additively separable across two components: a one-dimensional productive component and a...

This paper explores the interaction between incentives, information, and organizational design. It argues that the virtues of the market economy do not lie so much in the vision of competition and decentralization embodied in the Arrow-Debreu model, or the Lange-Lerner-Taylor analysis of market...

The ability of credit rating agencies (CRAs) to influence financial markets has been widely debated in the academic literature, policy circles and general press. While some commentators think that CRAs’ announcements have relevant effects on the markets, others reckon that they may simply...

Vulnerability to manipulation is a threat to successful matching market design. However, some manipulation is often inevitable and the mechanism designer wants to compare manipulable mechanisms and pick the best. Real-life examples include reforms in the entry-level medical labor market in the...

We evaluate stakeholderism in the context of one constituency—workers—by exploring a few key known contributors to workers’ economic disadvantage: concentration and monopsony in labor markets, weak collective action protections for workers, a declining minimum wage, and the harsh reality...