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This paper addresses the notion of electronic economics by examining financial technology (fintech) firms' performance and corporate governance quality, using data from the United States. The findings support our maintained assumption that due to the economics of electronic platforms perused by financial technology firms, these firms outperform firms from other industries (non-Fintech). The final sample comprises 1,712 company-year observations between 2010 and 2019 (pre-COVID-19). The evidence suggests that our corporate governance quality index, developed from Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (www.oecd.org/corporate/corporate-governance-factbook.htm, 2019) guidelines, accurately captures corporate governance quality in the United States, principally due to the inclusion of an anti-bribery policy indicator, in the index. The results suggest that this evidence is not merely an artefact due to the corporate governance quality index potentially capturing priced risk factors. Our findings reveal that fintech firms have superior corporate governance quality than non-fintech and that fintech firms place more reliance on internal versus external corporate governance mechanisms, vis-a-vis companies in other industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test the agency theory of corporate political activity by examining the association between the legality of independent expenditures and antitakeover lawmaking in the US states. Exploiting changes in state law regarding the use of corporate independent expenditures in the pre-Citizens United era, we estimate that a state is more likely to pass antitakeover statutes that entrench management when firms are allowed to make independent expenditures. We also find that this relationship is conditional on the competitiveness of a state's electoral environment, suggesting that the threat of independent expenditures may move vulnerable legislators' votes on less salient issues, such as corporate governance. These findings are robust to competing public interest and political economy explanations for antitakeover lawmaking, and they reveal that allowing independent expenditures may create additional agency costs for owners through public policy. Finally, these results strongly challenge the claim that state-level antitakeover laws are exogenous to firms' activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managers' pay, and the way it is determined, can have an important impact on the success of firms, and even of whole economies. While there is a rich literature exploring these issues in the for-profit sector, managerial pay at nonprofit firms has received little attention. Yet nonprofit organizations suffer from agency problems that are similar to, or perhaps even more severe than, those observed at for-profit companies. Accordingly, this Article explores the implications for nonprofit governance of a world in which "managerial power" can affect nonprofit pay setting. This Article develops the theory and provides support in the form of original empirical evidence based on data from a large panel of colleges and universities collected across a ten-year period. Our findings support the hypothesis that donors with less leverage suffer from significant agency costs in setting president pay. For example, we find for the first time evidence of an otherwise counterintuitive negative association between the fraction of university revenue provided by current donations and president compensation, which we suggest shows that schools that are less dependent on donors are freer to set high pay. We discuss the implications of these findings for the regulation of nonprofits and for a broader understanding of the pay-setting process at for-profit as well as nonprofit organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]