Does CEO duality – the practice of one person serving both as a firm’s CEO and board chair – contribute to or inhibit firm performance? Agency theory suggests that CEO duality is bad for performance because it compromises the monitoring and control of the CEO. Stewardship theory, in contrast, argues that CEO duality may be good for performance due to the unity of command it presents. The empiri...

This paper documents the existence of a CEO Investment Cycle, in which disinvestment decreases over CEO tenure while investment increases, leading to “cyclical” firm growth in assets as well as in employment. The CEO investment cycle is present for both firings and non-performance related CEO turnovers. Its magnitude is substantial: the estimated difference in investment rate between the first ...

We conduct the first systematic analysis of the effect of CEO tenure on risk-taking. We document an overall positive impact of CEO tenure on risk-taking. Our results suggest that this positive relation may not be explained by tenure proxying for power, experiences, or human capital investment. Instead, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that the declining career concerns associated ...

This paper investigates the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on corporate performance. This article selects 36 M&A cases of China’s listed real estate companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2008 to 2009. Regarding the corporate value in 2011 as the measure of the long-term performance, we will explore the relationship among check-and-balance Ownership Structure, board s...

This article presents the growing research area of Behavioural Corporate Finance in the context of one specific example: distortions in corporate investment due to CEO overconfidence. We first review the relevant psychology and experimental evidence on overconfidence. We then summarise the results of Malmendier and Tate (2005a) on the impact of overconfidence on corporate investment. We present...

‘this paper examines the relation between the monitoring of CEOs by inside aud outside directors and CEO resignations. CEO resignations are predicted using stock returns and earnings changes as measures of prior performance. There is a stronger association between prior performance and the prhability of a resignation for companies with outsider-dominated boards than for companies with insider-d...