CGRI research spans these topics: general principles, board of directors, leadership and succession planning, compensation, audit and risk, shareholders, and proxy advisory.
Financial Flexibility and Corporate Employment
We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage points more…
Where’s the Greenium?
This study investigates whether investors are willing to trade-off wealth for societal benefits. We take advantage of unique institutional features of the municipal securities market to provide insight into this question. Since 2013, over $23…
Peer Group Choice and Chief Executive Officer Compensation
We examine the selection of peer groups that boards of directors use when setting the level of CEO compensation. This choice is controversial because it is difficult to ascertain whether peer groups are selected to (i) attract and retain top…
Non-Answers During Conference Calls
We construct a novel measure of disclosure choice by firms. Our measure uses linguistic analysis of conference calls to flag a manager’s response as providing an explicit “non-answer” to an analyst’s question. Using our measure, about 11% of…
Long-Term Economic Consequences of Hedge Fund Activist Interventions
We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Prior papers document positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically conclude that…
Political Connections and the Informativeness of Insider Trades
This paper examines the relation between political connections and informed trading by corporate insiders in the context of the Financial Crisis. The unprecedented magnitude of government intervention, the substantial impact of this intervention…
CEO Personality and Firm Policies
Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big…
An Exploratory Investigation of the Determinants and Ratings Implications of Performance Appraisal Plan Characteristics
Performance appraisal is one of the cornerstones of management control systems. Although this topic has been the subject of considerable prior research, most of this work is based on a single observation per firm or performance appraisal…
Performance-Based Incentives for Internal Monitors
This study examines the use of performance-based incentives for internal monitors (general counsel and chief internal auditor) and whether these incentives impair monitors independence by aligning their interests with the interests of those being…