Outside directors have incentives to resign to protect their reputation or to avoid an increase in their workload when they anticipate that the firm on whose board they sit will perform poorly or disclose adverse news. We call these incentives the dark side of outside directors. We find strong...

Using more than 50,000 firm-years from 1988 to 2015, we show that the empirical relation between a firm's Tobin's q and managerial ownership is systematically negative. When we restrict our sample to larger firms as in the prior literature, our findings are consistent with the literature,...

We explore the critical question of how executives make strategic decisions. Utilizing a new survey of 262 CEO alumni of Harvard Business School, we gather evidence on four aspects of each executive's business strategy: its overall structure, its formalization, its development, and its...

This paper identifies a class of multiperiod agency problems in which the optimal contract is tractable (attainable in closed form). By modeling the noise before the action in each period, we force the contract to provide sufficient incentives state-by-state, rather than merely on average. This...

Contracts in a dynamic model must address a number of issues absent from static frameworks. Shocks to firm value may weaken the incentive effects of securities (e.g. cause options to fall out of the money), and the impact of some CEO actions may not be felt until far in the future. We derive the...

We investigate whether bank performance during the credit crisis of 2008 is related to CEO incentives and share ownership before the crisis and whether CEOs reduced their equity stakes in their banks in anticipation of the crisis. There is no evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were...

This paper presents a unified framework for understanding the determinants of both CEO incentives and total pay levels in competitive market equilibrium. It embeds a modified principal-agent problem into a talent assignment model to endogenize both elements of compensation. The model's closed...

This paper develops a simple equilibrium model of CEO pay. CEOs have different talents and are matched to firms in a competitive assignment model. In market equilibrium, a CEO's pay changes one for one with aggregate firm size, while changing much less with the size of his own firm. The model...

This paper uses novel, firm-level measures derived from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms to study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover leads to an initial decrease in intra-firm communication, followed by a...