I earned my PhD degree from the University of Southern California in 2010 and joined the BI faculty the same year. My main area of research is corporate finance with particular attention to employee/executive compensation and corporate governance problems. I am also interested in behavioral and experimental economics.
To view my papers and a detailed CV visit my Personal Homepage.
Publications
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.