Extensive discussions of the inefficiencies of "short-termism" in executive compensation notwithstanding, very little is known empirically about the extent of such short-termism. This paper develops a novel measure of executive pay duration that reflects the vesting periods of different pay...

This paper examines the two-way relationship between managerial compensation and corporate risk by exploiting an unanticipated change in firms' business risks. The natural experiment provides an opportunity to examine two classic questions related to incentives and risk — how boards adjust...

We explore the role of stock liquidity in influencing the composition of CEO annual pay and the sensitivity of managerial wealth to stock prices. We find that as stock liquidity goes up, the proportion of equity-based compensation in total compensation increases while the proportion of...

We examine the effect of auditor expertise on managerial equity-based compensation. Consistent with theories that predict that firms will grant more equity-based compensation to their managers when financial statement manipulation is more likely to be detected, we find strong evidence that firms...

Using a large dataset of performance goals employed in executive incentive contracts we find that a disproportionately large number of firms exceed their goals by a small margin as compared to the number that fall short of the goal by a similar margin. This asymmetry is particularly acute for...

While much is made of the ills of “short-termism” in executive compensation, in reality very little is known empirically about the extent of short-termism in CEO compensation. This paper develops a new measure of CEO pay duration that reflects the vesting periods of different components of...

Competitive sorting models of the CEO labor market (e.g., Edmans, Gabaix and Landier (2009)) predict that differences in CEO productive abilities, or "talent", should be an important determinant of CEO pay. However, measuring CEO talent empirically represents a major challenge. In this paper, we...