Using U.S. state legislatures’ staggered adoption of constituency statutes over a 24-year period (1984–2007) as a quasi-natural experiment, we show that greater stakeholder orientation significantly increases firms’ inventory efficiency. Further...Read more
This study investigates how directors make decisions that involve shareholders and other stakeholders. Using vignettes derived from seminal court cases, we construct an index of directors’ shareholderism as a general orientation on this issue. In...Read more
Understanding the role of culture in corporate governance has become a subject of growing importance. Today, no institutional analysis of corporate governance systems would be complete without considering the cultural environment in which such...Read more
This paper empirically analyzes a private ordering solution to multiforum shareholder litigation: exclusive forum provisions in corporate charters and bylaws. These provisions, whose use has become quite widespread, require that all corporate law...Read more
Economic models routinely assume firms maximize shareholder wealth; however common law legal systems only require that officers and directors pursue the interests of the corporation, leaving this ill-defined. Economic arguments for shareholder...Read more
Boards of directors are intellectually interesting; the literature on boards has academic impact, and there is substantial scope for this literature to have policy impact.
I illustrate these points by combining a select review of the...Read more
The relationship between changes in GDP and unemployment during the 2008 financial crisis differed significantly from previous experiences and across countries. We study firm-level decisions in France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US. We find...Read more
Corporate customers are an important stakeholder in global supply chains. We employ several unique international databases to test whether socially responsible corporate customers can infuse similar socially responsible business behavior in...Read more
The stockholder/stakeholder dilemma has occupied corporate leaders and corporate lawyers for over a century. In addition to the question whose interests should managers prioritize, the question how those interests could or should be balanced has...Read more
We are witnessing a quiet but quick transformation of corporate governance. The rise of digital technologies and social media are forcing companies to reconsider how they organize themselves and structure firm governance.
What is...Read more
Historically, economic activities have been organized around certain ideologies. We investigate the impact of politicians’ ideology on corporate policies by exploring a unique setting of ideological change—China from Mao to Deng around the 1978...Read more
