Center for Leadership Development and Research

David F. Larcker
James Irvin Miller Professor of Accounting, Stanford Graduate School of Business; Robert and Marilyn Jaedicke Faculty Fellow for 2007-08; Director of the Corporate Governance Research Program; Director of the Stanford Directors' Forum Executive Program; Codirector, The Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

David 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, the role of the business press in the debate on executive compensation, and modeling the cost of executive stock options.

Robert M. Daines
Professor of Finance (by Courtesy); Pritzker Professor of Law and Business, School of Law; Faculty Director, The Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

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;
Faculty Director, The Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

Joseph Grundfest is a nationally prominent expert on capital markets, corporate governance, and securities litigation. He was a commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission and served on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisors as counsel and senior economist for legal and regulatory matters.

Anat Admati
Joseph McDonald 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's research focuses on political economy and the social, legal, and political environment of business. His work on corporate governance examines the objectives of the firm in the context of social pressure and corporate social responsibility, including managerial compensation contracts and social entrepreneurship.

Ron Gilson
Charles J. Meyers Professor of Law and Business, Stanford Law School

An experienced practitioner of corporate and securities law before entering academia, Ronald Gilson is the author of major casebooks on corporate finance and corporate acquisitions. He has written widely on U.S. and comparative corporate governance and on venture capital and was a reporter of the American Law Institute’s Corporate Governance Project. Professor Gilson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Corporate Governance Institute, and is the board chair for American Century Mountain View Mutual Funds, managing over $26 billion in assets. In addition to his role at Stanford Law School, he is the Marc and Eva Stern Professor of Law and Business at Columbia University School of Law.

Joy Ishii
Assistant Professor of Finance; Ormond Family Faculty Scholar for 2007-08

Joy Ishii’s research is in the areas of empirical industrial organization and corporate finance. Recent work has examined the role of network effects in ATM's in the retail banking industry, estimation methods involving moment inequalities, and the relationship between firm-level corporate governance structures and corporate performance.

Alan Jagolinzer
Assistant Professor of Accounting; James and Doris McNamara Faculty Scholar for 2007-08

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.

Michael Klausner
Nancy and Charles Munger Professor of Business and Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

A leading scholar of corporate law and corporate governance, Michael Klausner has conducted in-depth empirical studies of outside directors. His recent scholarship has focused on securities litigation, directors' and officers' liability insurance, and the liability risk of outside directors.

Maureen McNichols
Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management; Professor of Law (by courtesy), Stanford Law School; Co-Director of the Stanford Governance Forum Executive Program; Graduate School of Business Trust Faculty Fellow for 2007-08

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 Human Resources Management and Organizational Behavior;
Hank McKinnell-Pfizer Inc. Director of the Center for Leadership Development and Research;
Director of the Human Resource Executive Program;
Director of the Leading Change and Organizational Renewal Executive Program

Charles O'Reilly's research focuses on the social psychological determinants of executive pay setting. His current projects include the effects of CEO over and underpayment on employees, the effects of social influence processes on CEO pay and governance processes. His other research interests include studies of senior leadership, top management teams, and organizational innovation and change.

Michael Ostrovsky
Assistant Professor of Economics; MBA Class of 1969 Faculty Scholar for 2007-08

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 does research in the area of Personnel Economics, focusing on how firms manage their human resources. He recently completed a project studying the effects of mandatory disclosure regulation on stock price and firms' operating performance, focusing on the 1964 amendments to federal securities regulation. He has also done extensive work on the costs and benefits of broad-based stock option plans and how compensation contracts affect the distribution of sales and profits over firms' fiscal years.

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 Financial Management Program

Paul Pfleiderer's research interests include microstructure and design of financial markets, financial disclosure regulation, corporate finance and venture capital, portfolio theory and portfolio optimization. He also has studied the incentives used to compensate professional portfolio managers, concluding that benchmarking can distort the way a manager uses information to assemble portfolios.

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 non-financial 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 and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs; Professor of Economics (by courtesy), School of Humanities and Sciences; Codirector of the Executive Program in Strategy and Organization
Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy; Faculty Director of the Global Management Program; BP Faculty Fellow in Global Management

John Roberts' research focuses on the economics of organization, especially the connection between strategy and organizational design, with particular reference to multinationals. His work in governance has studied giving a role in governance to other stakeholders and when this is valuable.

Evelyn Williams
Lecturer in Management; Director of the Leadership Laboratories of the Center for Leadership Development and Research

Evelyn Williams’ research focuses on leadership, team dynamics, interpersonal dynamics, curriculum design, organizational behavior, and management communication. Her recent work investigates the task, process, and relational currencies used by high-performing teams and individuals.

Program Manager

Michelle E. Gutman
Program Manager
Corporate Governance Research Program
Email: gutman_michelle@gsb.stanford.edu
Phone: 650.736.7420

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