Center for Leadership Development and Research

David F. Larcker
James Irvin Miller Professor of Accounting
Director of the Corporate Governance Research Program
Codirector of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford
Codirector of the Directors' Consortium Executive Program

Professor Larcker’s research focuses on executive compensation, corporate governance, and managerial accounting. His work examines the choice of performance measures and compensation contracts in organizations. He has current research projects on the valuation implications of corporate governance, role of the business press in the debate on executive compensation, and modeling the cost of executive stock options.

Robert M. Daines
Pritzker Professor of Law and Business; Professor of Finance (by courtesy);
Codirector of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford

An internationally recognized corporate law scholar, Robert Daines is widely known for his rigorous statistical analysis of empirical data on the relationship between economic theory and corporate governance and contracting in practice. His recent work has focused on issues in corporate governance, such as CEO pay, mandatory disclosure regulations, and the use of classified boards of directors.

Joseph A. Grundfest
W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, School of Law;
Codirector of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford

Joseph A. Grundfest is a nationally prominent expert on capital markets, corporate governance, and securities litigation. His scholarship has been published in the Harvard, Yale, and Stanford law reviews, and he has been recognized as one of the most influential attorneys in the United States. Professor Grundfest founded the award-winning Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, which provides detailed, online information about the prosecution, defense, and settlement of federal class action securities fraud litigation. He also launched Stanford Law School’s executive education programs, and continues to co-direct Directors' College, the nation's leading venue for the continuing professional education of directors of publicly traded corporations.

Anat R. Admati
George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics
Professor of Management Science and Engineering (by courtesy), School of Engineering; Professor of Economics (by courtesy), School of Humanities and Sciences

Anat Admati is primarily a financial economics theorist. Her research focuses on issues related to the dissemination of information in financial markets. She has written, in particular, on trading patterns in markets where some investors may have private information and on markets where information is sold, e.g., through newsletters or active mutual fund. She also has studied portfolio performance measurement, venture capital contracting, and the desirability of setting disclosure standards for firms. Most recently, her research interests focus on corporate governance and she has written particularly on the role of large shareholders.

David Baron
David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor of Political Economy and Strategy, Emeritus

David Baron has published in the fields of industrial organization, economic theory, political science, business strategy, operations research, statistics, and finance. He has authored over 100 articles and 3 books, one of which is in its 5th edition. His principal research interests have been the theory of the firm, the economics of regulation, mechanism design and its applications, political economics, and nonmarket strategy. His current research focuses on political economics and strategy in the business environment.

Darrell Duffie
Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance

Darrell Duffie’s research interests include over-the-counter market financial modeling, financial risk management, credit risk, valuation of defaultable securities, valuation and hedging of derivative securities, term structure of interest rate modeling, financial innovation, and security design. Recently, Duffie has focused on how capital moves from one segment of asset markets to another, and the implications of imperfect trading opportunities for asset price behavior, especially in over-the-counter markets. Duffie and several collaborators have some recent results on portfolio credit risk, based on the assumption that there are unobservable common default-risk factors.

Joy Ishii
Assistant Professor of Finance

Joy Ishii’s research focuses on empirical corporate finance and banking. Recent work has examined the valuation effects of insider stock ownership, the relationship between firm-level corporate governance structures and corporate performance, the role of social networks in corporate finance, and the role of network effects in ATMs in the retail banking industry.

Alan Jagolinzer
Assistant Professor of Accounting

Alan Jagolinzer’s research focuses on the economic impact of financial reporting standards, the economic impact of insider trading regulation, and the valuation of executive option compensation. His current research projects explore how corporate insiders trade within SEC Rule 10b5-1, what the market can infer from corporate insiders’ use of prepaid variable forward transactions, the market’s perception of events leading to IFRS adoption in Europe, and the impact of early employee stock option exercise on option expense valuation.

Dirk Jenter
Assistant Professor of Finance

Professor Jenter's work focuses on the interaction of managers and firms with (possibly inefficient) capital markets. Recent research projects have examined the capital structure decisions of U.S. firms, option and stock compensation for top executives and other employees, insider trading by managers, the role of institutional investors in mergers and acquisitions, and the effects of the business cycle on forced CEO turnover.

Ron Kasznik
Associate Professor of Accounting

Ron Kasznik's research focuses on examining the strategic use of accounting and financial information by market participants, particularly firm managers. Within this broad area, he focuses primarily on issues related to the provision of financial and non-financial information, the determinants and outcomes of voluntary disclosures, incentives to manage reported earnings, and the disclosure and reporting effects of employee stock options.

Maureen McNichols
Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management; Professor of Law (by courtesy), Stanford Law School

Maureen McNichols’ research examines financial reporting and its role in providing information to investors. Her recent work focuses on earnings quality, on earnings management and on securities analysts. The research on earnings quality examines the informativeness of earnings and its components under alternative accounting principles. The research on earnings management examines companies’ incentives and methods for managing earnings, detection of managed earnings and the consequences for investors. The research on analysts examines their incentives to report information truthfully, how investment banking influences analysts’ behavior, and the implications for investors.

Charles O'Reilly, III
Frank E. Buck Professor of Management
Hank McKinnell - Pfizer Inc. Director of the Center for Leadership Development and Research
Director of the Leading Change and Organizational Renewal Executive Program

Professor Charles O’Reilly’s research includes studies of leadership, organizational culture and demography, the management of human resources, and the impact of change and innovation on firms. He has published widely in his field, including the books Winning Through Innovation: a Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal with M. Tushman (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) and Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People with J. Pfeffer (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). His recent work investigates how managers can design organizations that can generate streams of innovation and deal with disruptive technological change

Michael Ostrovsky
Assistant Professor of Economics

Michael Ostrovsky’s research is in the areas of game theory, industrial organization, and corporate finance. Most recently, he has analyzed internet advertising auctions, stability in vertical networks, and proxy voting by mutual funds.

Paul Oyer
Associate Professor of Economics

Paul Oyer studies the economics of organizations and human resource practices. His recent work has looked at the use of broad-based stock option plans, how firms use non-cash benefits, and how firms respond to limits on their ability to displace workers. Oyer’s current projects include studies of how labor market conditions affect their entire careers when MBAs and PhD economists leave school, how firms identify and recruit workers in high-skill and competitive labor markets (with a focus on the markets for software engineers and newly minted lawyers), and, of most importance to his colleagues, how universities price and allocate parking spaces.

Francisco Pérez-González
Assistant Professor of Finance

Francisco Pérez-González’s research is in the intersection of corporate finance and organizational economics, with particular interest in family firms. He has studied how the incentives of large shareholders can shape dividend payout and managerial succession decisions; the impact of ownership structures on productivity; and the interaction between product market competition and corporate governance. Recent work has examined the importance of top managerial talent for firm performance in family controlled firms in the U.S. and abroad.

Jeffrey Pfeffer
Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior

Jeffrey Pfeffer has published extensively in the fields of organization theory and human resource management. His current research focuses on the relationship between time and money, power and leadership in organizations, economics language and assumptions and their effects on management practice, how social science theories become self-fulfilling, barriers to turning knowledge into action and how to overcome them, and evidence-based management—what it is, barriers to its use, and how to implement it.

Paul Pfleiderer
C.O.G. Miller Distinguished Professor of Finance; Professor of Law (by courtesy), Stanford Law School; Codirector of the Wealth Management Executive Program

Paul Pfleiderer’s research is primarily focused on issues arising in financial markets when traders are asymmetrically informed. He has developed theoretical models to analyze how information is incorporated in prices through trading and how information flows determine trading volume. He has also analyzed how information is sold to investors when the value of the information is reduced the more widely it is disseminated. In addition he has studied problems in measuring active funds’ performance, contracting concerns in venture financing, policy issues related to disclosure requirements, and explanations for the stock market crash of 1987. His current research concerns corporate governance.

Joseph D. Piotroski
Associate Professor of Accounting

Professor Joseph Piotroski’s research primarily focuses on financial reporting issues. Within this broad area, his research focuses on how capital market participants use financial accounting information for valuation and risk assessment purposes, how financial, legal, regulatory and political institutions shape capital market behavior (including financial reporting practices, governance practices, insider trading activity and foreign listing behavior) and the economic consequences of alternative financial reporting, information dissemination and governance practices around the world.

Madhav Rajan
Gregor G. Peterson Professor of Accounting
Professor of Law (by courtesy), Stanford Law School

Madhav Rajan specializes in the economics-based analysis of management accounting issues. His work examines the optimal choice of information and incentive systems in firms and the rationale behind observed internal accounting practices. Rajan has done analytical, empirical, and field-based work on the role of incentives in supply chain contracting, the use of nonfinancial performance measures, and the value of “cost of quality” accounting systems in modern manufacturing environments. His recent work has focused on the links between economic and accounting profitability, the use of internal auction markets for resource allocation, and the usefulness of subjective measures of performance.

John Roberts
John H. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management, and International Business
Professor of Economics (by courtesy), School of Humanities and Sciences
Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy
Faculty Director of the Global Management Program
Codirector of the Executive Program in Strategy and Organization

John Roberts’ teaching and research involve the application of economic and strategic (game-theoretic) analysis to management problems. His specific areas of current interest involve international business, the organization of the firm, and the connection between strategy and organization.

Staff

Michelle E. Gutman
Associate Director, Research Programs
Corporate Governance Research Program &
Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance
Email: gutman_michelle@gsb.stanford.edu
Phone: 650.736.7420

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