Golden Coffins: an Empirical Analysis
| Author(s) | McGoldrick, Christopher | |
| Date Accessioned | 2009-09-30T22:46:09Z | |
| Date Available | 2009-09-30T22:46:09Z | |
| Publication Date | 2009-05 | |
| Abstract | This paper studies death benefit payments that would be made to the estates of CEOs who die while in office. I develop a model based on the theory of managerial rent extraction to separately test the explanatory power of two widely used governance indexes in predicting the size of these awards. I then test the model on a subset of 125 companies within the S&P 500 that reported these benefits in their 2008 proxy statements. The average size of the death benefit awarded to the CEO was $22.2 million and I find that weaker governance structures as measured by the GIM Governance Index are associated with larger death benefits. | en |
| Advisor | Charles Elson | |
| Program | Finance | |
| URL | http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/4399 | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Survivors' benefits | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Decedents' estates | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Chief executive officers | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Proxy statements | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Managerial accounting | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Corporate governance | |
| Title | Golden Coffins: an Empirical Analysis | en |
| Type | Undergraduate Thesis | en |