I am educated at Brown University (Ph.D., M.A. in Economics) and the University of Copenhagen (B.A. in Economics). Before joining BI Norwegian Business School, I was at the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics. I have also spent time at the research division of the Central Bank of Norway and at the University of Salerno. I am an associated researcher at the Europen Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and the Centre for Corporate Governance Research (CCGR).
Research areas My primary areas of interest are banking and corporate governance.
The main research question that I have considered concerns the real effects of bank shocks and bank market integration on outcome variables such as bank lending to small businesses, firm investment and cash management, and inter-regional risk sharing. I have also done work on shareholder activism and how social capital sustain the viability of the savings bank organizational form.
Currently, Im working on governance in Norwegian industrial corporations in the early 20th century and on entrepreneurial firms. My work has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Finance, and the Journal of Political Economy.
Teaching areas
Financial Intermediation, Credit Markets, Corporate Finance and Financial Management, Derivatives and Risk Management.
Burkart, Mike; Miglietta, Salvatore & Ostergaard, Charlotte (2023)
Why Do Boards Exist? Governance Design in the Absence of Corporate Law
The Review of financial studies, 36(5), s. 1788- 1836. Doi: 10.1093/rfs/hhac072
We study under which circumstances firms choose to install boards and their roles in a historical setting in which neither boards nor their duties are mandated by law. Boards arise in firms with large, heterogeneous shareholder bases. We propose that an important role of boards is to mediate between heterogeneous shareholders with divergent interests. Voting restrictions are common and ensure that boards are representative and not captured by large blockholders. Boards are given significant powers to both mediate and monitor management, and these roles are intrinsically linked.
Ostergaard, Charlotte; Sasson, Amir & Sørensen, Bent E. (2020)
Cash flow sensitivities and bank-finance shocks in non-listed firms
We study how small firms manage cash flows by estimating cash flow sensitivities for all sources and uses of cash. Our data are Norwegian non-listed firms which can be matched to the banks they borrow from. Firms with low cash holdings mainly use external finance to offset cash flow fluctuations over the cycle, whereas firms with high cash holdings rely mainly on internal finance. Estimating how cash flow sensitivities change with exogenous bank shocks, we find that the cyclicality of cash-poor firms' investment is amplified because they do not substitute internal for external finance. Our results imply that for small firms, the transmission of financial shocks to the real economy is closely tied to their accumulation of cash.
Ostergaard, Charlotte; Schindele, Ibolya & Vale, Bent (2016)
Social Capital and the Viability of Stakeholder-Oriented Firms: Evidence from Savings Banks