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 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...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model - even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the wage...