Corporate Governance

This paper proposes an accounting for revenues as an alternative to the proposals currently begin aired by the FASB and IASB. Existing revenue recognition rules are vague, resulting in messy application, so the Boards are seeking a remedy. However, their proposals replace the traditional criteria — revenue is recognized when it is both "realized or realizable" and "earned" — with similarly vague notions that require both the identification of a "performance obligation" and the "satisfaction" of a performance obligation.

Disparity between control and ownership rights gives rise to the risk of tunneling by the controlling shareholder. This disparity is prevalent in many emerging market economies and present in some developed countries. This paper studies whether and how the degree of control-ownership disparity in investors' home countries affects their portfolio choice in an emerging market. It combines two unique data sets on ownership and control in business groups, and investor-stock level foreign investment in Korea.

This paper describes the motives that gave rise to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, summarizes the history of Fed monetary policy from its origins in 1914 through the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951, and reviews several of the principal controversies that surround that history. The persistence of conceptual errors in Fed monetary policy — particularly adherence to the "real bills doctrine" — is a central puzzle in monetary history, particularly in light of the enormous costs of Fed failures during the Great Depression.

This paper shows that Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) meaningfully affect firm performance. Using variation in CEO exposure resulting from the numer of days a CEO is hospitalized, we provide estimates of the effect of CEOs on firm policies, holding firm and CEO matches constant. We have four main findings. First, CEOs have an economically and statistically significant effect on profitability, revenue, and investment outcomes. Firms whose CEOs are hospitalized underperform when their chief executives are sick but otherwise exhibit similar performance relative to other firms.

We develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs' time use. The idea — sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up — is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm's priorities as well as the presence of governance issues. We follow 94 CEOs of top-600 Italian firms over a pre-specified week and record the time devoted each day to different work activities. We focus on the distinction between time spent with insiders (employees of the firm) and outsiders (people not employed by the firm).

Managing Change: Cases and Concepts, 3e by Todd Jick and Maury Peiperl is comprised of six modules that introduce common threads in the ensuing case studies and readings on organizational change. The materials in this edition — cases and readings — have been chosen and arranged to introduce change as an integrated process. Cases in the text represent a wide variety of change situations. Accompanying many cases are readings, likewise chosen to reflect a broad range of issues.

A certain number of corporations, probably an increasing number, go considerably beyond what is required of them legally in minimizing their environmental impact. They meet legal limits on environmental impacts and then go beyond these. This has been called "overcompliance," a descriptive, if not elegant, phrase designating going well beyond what is required by laws and regulations in force. Why do corporations overcomply, going beyond what is legally required of them?

Active investors provide entrepreneurs with risk-sharing and value-adding effort, e.g., in form of advising, networking and monitoring. However, holdup problems may create a conflict between two key objectives for high-quality entrepreneurs: to elicit investor effort and to credibly signal their firm type by retaining shares. As a result, pooling of startup firms of different types may arise, in particular when investor effort is essential. More established firms, with access to multiple signals, can always realize both of these objectives.