Defense of Matthias Müllner

On May 5 th, 2022, Matthias Müllner successfully defended his Doctoral thesis “Corporate Governance and Innovation – An Information Design Perspective” at the University of Graz, supervised by CAR’s Alfred Wagenhofer and Ralf Ewert. Matthias was a DART student for over three years and an active participant in several DART and international seminars. Matthias’ thesis studies the strategic design of information and its effect on investment decisions, innovation, and total welfare. First, he analyzed how board busyness and expertise affect the manager’s information design when communicating with the board. Second, he studied how bard monitoring affects the manager’s strategic information design to persuade the board to invest in a project. Third, he analyzed the interaction of accounting conservatism and input pricing regulations and their effect on innovation in a vertically related market.