Recent long-run time series evidence for the US suggests that popular explanations for the surge in executive pay are not supported by the data. This paper explores the role of globalization for the rise in executive pay based on new firm survey data on executives and their pay in Austria and...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

This paper shows that there is a natural trade-off when designing market-based executive compensation. The benefit of market-based pay is that the stock price aggregates speculators' dispersed information and therefore takes a picture of managerial performance before the long-term value of a...

This paper provides a model that can account for the almost uniform staggering of wage contracts in some countries as well as for the markedly nonuniform staggering in others. In the model, short and long contracts as well as long contracts concluded in different periods are strategic...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. The results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage gift and the agent's ability to repay the gift. We collect information on...

This paper is a quantitative, equilibrium study of the insurance role of severance pay when workers face displacement risk and markets are incomplete. A key feature of our model is that, in line with an established empirical literature, job displacement entails a persistent fall in earnings upon...