Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

Since the adoption of the Performance Based Bonus (PBB) scheme in 2012, its effectiveness-particularly its impact on agencies' reform efforts and on public sector employees' motivation and productivity-have not yet been examined. The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) deems it critical to...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency's total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition, it...

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (2008) to detect whether the widely used class of Residual Income based...

Influenced by their compensation plans, CEOs make their own luck through decisions that affect future firm risk. After adopting a relative performance evaluation (RPE) plan, total and idiosyncratic risk are higher, and the correlation between firm and industry performance is lower. The opposite...

Understanding CEO compensation plans is a continuing challenge for directors and investors. The disclosure of these plans is dictated by SEC rules that rely heavily on the “fair value” of awards at the time they are granted. The problem with these numbers is that they are static and do not...

In this paper I consider the impact of a noisy indicator regarding a manager’s manipulative behavior on optimal effort incentives and the extent of earnings management. The analysis in this paper extends a twotask, single performance measure LEN model by including a binary random variable. I...