This paper examines how political networks influence insider trading in China. Using biographical data to construct chairman–politician social networks, we find that firms with stronger political networks engage in significantly less insider trading. The effect is stronger for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) and for long-standing or high-ranking connections. The muted trading persists during periods when insiders possess valuable private information, including prior to M&A announcements and major policy events. The evidence suggests that personal political networks function as informal governance mechanisms that discipline managerial opportunism when formal governance through state ownership is absent.

This paper analyzes if lenders resolve managerial agency problems in loan contracts using sweep covenants. Sweeps require a (partial) prepayment when triggered and are included in many contracts. Exploiting exogenous reductions in analyst coverage due to brokerage house mergers and closures, we find that increased borrower opacity significantly increases sweep use. The effect is strongest for borrowers with higher levels of managerial entrenchment and if lenders hold both debt and equity in the firm. Overall, our results suggest that lenders implement sweep covenants to mitigate managerial agency problems by limiting contingencies of wealth expropriation.

We study unethical behavior toward unrelated coworkers as a response to managerial unkindness with two experiments. In our lab experiment, we do not find that subjects who experienced unkindness are more likely to cheat in a subsequent competition against another coworker who simultaneously experienced mistreatment. A subsequent survey experiment suggests that behavior in the lab can be explained by individuals' preferences for norm adherence, because unkind management behavior does not alter the perceived moral appropriateness of cheating. However, having no shared experience of managerial unkindness opens up some moral wiggle room for employees to misbehave at the costs of others.

Delegating managerial tasks is essential for firm growth. Most firms in developing countries, however, do not hire outside managers but instead rely on family members. In this paper, we ask if this lack of managerial delegation can explain why firms in poor countries are small and whether it has important aggregate consequences. We construct a model of firm growth where entrepreneurs have a fixed time endowment to run their daily operations. As firms grow large, the need to hire outside managers increases. Firms’ willingness to expand therefore depends on the ease with which delegation can take place. We calibrate the model to plant-level data from the U.S. and India. We identify the key parameters of our theory by targeting the experimental evidence on the effect of managerial practices on firm performance from Bloom et al. (2013). We find that inefficiencies in the delegation environment account for 11% of the income per capita difference between the U.S. and India. They also contribute to the small size of Indian producers, but would cause substantially more harm for U.S. firms. The reason is that U.S. firms are larger on average and managerial delegation is especially valuable for large firms, thus making delegation efficiency and other factors affecting firm growth complements.

I model the joint effects of debt, macroeconomic conditions, and cash flow cyclicality on risk-shifting behavior and managerial wealth-for-performance sensitivity. The model shows that risk-shifting incentives rise during recessions and that the shareholders can eliminate such adverse incentives by reducing the equity-based compensation in managerial contracts. Moreover, this reduction should be larger in highly procyclical firms. These novel, testable predictions provide insights into optimal shareholder responses to agency costs of debt throughout the business cycle.