We examine the link between board gender diversity and managerial ability to transform corporate resources into revenue. Drawing on a sample of U.S firms during the period 2001–2016, we find a positive and economically meaningful association between female directors on boards and managerial ability, particularly when female directors are in monitoring roles on the board. The documented effect is stronger when using a tenure weighted measure of female representation on boards; and more pronounced for firms that have three or more women on the board of directors, in line with the critical mass hypothesis. We uncover that critical mass of female directors in monitoring roles is particularly conducive to enhancing managerial ability. Our channel analysis tests further reveal a distinctive tendency of firms with more gender diverse boards to shape the human capital of the firm by promoting managers with more generalist managerial skills. We find consistent results when we employ propensity score matching estimates and difference-in-differences using sudden deaths of female directors as a potential shock to address endogeneity concerns. We discuss implications for theory and policy.

The authors examine the effects of renegotiation in an agency relationship. They show how renegotiation affects (1) the set of actions the principal can induce the agent to take and (2) the cost of implementing a given action. The authors show that, when the principal receives an unverifiable signal of the agent's action, renegotiation can improve welfare. This result stands in contrast to earlier findings that renegotiation lowers welfare when the principal receives no signal about the agent's action prior to renegotiation.

We examine whether the presence of female directors and female audit committee members affect audit quality in terms of audit effort and auditor choice by using observations from a sample of U.S. firms, spanning the years 2001–2011. We find, after controlling for endogeneity and other board, firm, and industry characteristics, that firms with gender‐diverse boards (audit committees) pay 6 percent (8 percent) higher audit fees and are 6 percent (7 percent) more likely to choose specialist auditors compared to all‐male boards (audit committees). Our findings suggest that boards (audit committees) with female directors (members) are likely to demand higher audit quality, ceteris paribus.

This study examines the relation between performance covenants in private debt contracting and conservative accounting under adverse selection. We find that under severe adverse selection (i.e., high information asymmetry), accounting conservatism and performance covenants act as complements to signal that the borrower is unlikely to appropriate wealth from the lender. No such relation obtains in a low information asymmetry regime. We further show that in the high information asymmetry regime, borrowers with high levels of conservatism and tight performance covenants generally enjoy lower interest rate spreads than borrowers with low levels of conservatism and loose performance covenants. Consistent with our signaling theory, in the high information asymmetry regime, borrowers with high levels of conservatism and tight performance covenants are less likely to make abnormal payouts to shareholders. Our empirical results are robust to alternative measures of conservatism and covenant restrictiveness.

What shapes the optimal degree of progressivity of the tax and transfer system? On the one hand, a progressive tax system can counteract inequality in initial conditions and substitute for imperfect private insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. On the other hand, progressivity reduces incentives to work and to invest in skills, distortions that are especially costly when the government must finance public goods. We develop a tractable equilibrium model that features all of these trade-offs. The analytical expressions we derive for social welfare deliver a transparent understanding of how preference, technology, and market structure parameters influence the optimal degree of progressivity. A calibration for the U.S. economy indicates that endogenous skill investment, flexible labor supply, and the desire to finance government purchases play quantitatively similar roles in limiting optimal progressivity. In a version of the model where poverty constrains skill investment, optimal progressivity is close to the U.S. value. An empirical analysis on cross-country data offers support to the theory.

This paper examines the determinants and consequences of investor activism in venture capital. Using a hand-collected sample of European venture capital deals, it shows the importance of human capital. Venture capital firms with partners that have prior business experience are more active recruiting managers and directors, helping with fundraising, and interacting more frequently with their portfolio companies. Independent venture capital firms are also more active than ‘captive’ (bank-, corporate-, or government-owned) firms. After controlling for endogeneity, investor activism is shown to be positively related to the success of portfolio companies.

We provide evidence that higher-quality disclosure standards are associated with stock returns that are less sensitive to noise driven by investors' moods. We identify return-mood sensitivity (RMS) based on the association between index returns and urban cloudiness, a source of short-term variation in mood. Based on a stylized model, we predict and find evidence consistent with higher-quality disclosure standards reducing RMS by tilting susceptible investors' trades toward information and by facilitating sophisticated investors' arbitrage. Our findings suggest that disclosure standards play an important role in enhancing price efficiency by reducing noise in returns, particularly noise related to investors' short-term moods.

Theory posits that when managers anticipate excess capacity, average q becomes a biased estimator of marginal q as the potential for underutilizing new capital reduces the marginal benefit of investing. After correcting for this source of measurement error, the explanatory power of Tobin's q substantially improves in time‐series and cross‐sectional regressions as well as in out‐of‐sample tests. These findings, together with a secular erosion in capacity utilization, help explain why corporate investment rates have been declining for decades despite average q increasing significantly. Our analysis indicates that economic rigidities have contributed to the persistent erosion in capacity utilization.

We analyze how changes in government policy affect stock prices. Our general equilibrium model features uncertainty about government policy and a government whose decisions have both economic and noneconomic motives. The model makes numerous empirical predictions. Stock prices should fall at the announcement of a policy change, on average. The price decline should be large if uncertainty about government policy is large, and also if the policy change is preceded by a short or shallow economic downturn. Policy changes should increase volatilities and correlations among stocks. The jump risk premium associated with policy decisions should be positive, on average.

An authoritative account of this extraordinary 18th-century financial, political, and royal scandal, this book describes the drama of the promotion, the insane fever of speculation, and the international impact of the final collapse.