Overview

Professor Dey’s research explores governance and agency conflicts, board structure, governance regulation and corporate behavior, ownership structure, and the relation between executives’ characteristics and corporate behavior. In analyzing corporate governance mechanisms, she seeks to answer the broad questions, “Do the mechanisms serve to narrow the gap between managers’ and shareholders’ interests, and if so, how? Do they have a significant impact on firm performance and/or value? Should the mechanisms in a firm be regulated?” Her recent research incorporates behavioral economics into individual decision making in the corporate setting. Her studies revolve around understanding and measuring fundamental traits of individual executives and examining how and why aspects of executives’ character influence corporate governance and organizational outcomes. Her findings show that corporate governance boils down to personal governance: “who” leads the firm will ultimately decide the structure, strength, and integrity of the control system in place, and Professor Dey believes that this is the path that corporate governance research should take. Understanding various informal interpersonal dynamics among top management teams, such as trust and friendships, and how they influence the establishment of more formal institutional systems in corporations and decision making at the top levels of management, is one of Professor Dey’s several related research streams.