This paper examines the relation between managerial power and compensation for Chief Executive Officers of S&P 500 companies from 1993 through 2012. We find that more-powerful CEOs earn more than less-powerful CEOs. We refer to this additional compensation as a “power premium” and...

This study investigates the relation between the use of explicit employment agreements (EA) and CEO compensation. Overall, our findings are broadly consistent with the predictions of Klein, Crawford, and Alchian (1978) that an EA is used to induce CEOs to make firm-specific human capital...

Chhaochharia and Grinstein (JF, 2009) estimate that CEO pay decreases by 17% more in firms that were not compliant with the recent NYSE/NASDAQ board independence requirement than in firms that were compliant. We document that 74% of this magnitude is attributable to two outliers out of 865...

In their reply to our critique, Chhaochharia and Grinstein (2012) suggest that (i) Apple is a prime example of how board regulations affect CEO pay and should therefore not be excluded from the study, and (ii) their original results are robust to excluding the outliers when extending the...

Using Chhaochharia's and Grinstein's (JF, 2009) data and methodology, Guthrie, Sokolowsky, and Wan (JF, 2010) document that compensation committee independence leads to an increase in executive pay, and that the increase is concentrated in firms with powerful monitors. These findings stand in...

This paper examines why powerful CEOs are paid more in total compensation. Broadly, our results are consistent with the managerial ability view. First, CEO power is endogenously determined reflecting the CEO's ability. Specifically, founder-CEOs are more powerful than professional- and heir-CEOs...

Previous studies have found that board composition influences CEO compensation. However, these findings are susceptible to bias caused by endogeneity and outliers. This paper re-examines the above relation by exploring the impact on CEO total pay of a mandate for board composition imposed...

Prior research has used the principal-agent framework to examine managerial compensation. However, in a number of corporations, managers own enough of their firms' voting rights to be able to decide with relative impunity how they will be compensated. In a real sense, they are the principals....