The present paper proposes to employ a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. We use the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift and estimate the...

We analyze the relation of firm performance and managerial turnover in 19th century German banking by probit estimation. This period covers a major reform of corporate governance. Before the reform performance and turnover are unrelated, wheras after the reform more succesfull managers leave...

(forthcoming Journal of Political Economy). Part ownership of a takeover target can help a bidder win a takeover auction, often at a low price. A bidder with a "toehold" bids aggressively in a standard ascending auction because its offers are both bids for the remaining shares and asks for its...

Part ownership of a takeover target can help a bidder win a takeover auction, often at a low price. A bidder with a ``toehold'' bids aggressively in a standard ascending auction because its offers are both bids for the remaining shares and asks for its own holdings. While the direct effect of a...

Using an econometric procedure that corrects for both self-selection of individuals into their preferred compensation scheme and wage endogeneity, this study investigates whether significant differences exist in the job satisfaction of individuals receiving performance- related pay (PRP)...

Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity...

The rent-sharing literature and the agency literature both predict a link between pay and performance. The rent-sharing literature relies on short-term market power to explain this link, and the agency literature bases its prediction on the importance of incentives in principal-agent...

The existing debate about policies designed to foster the development of a stakeholder economy have largely avoided a fundamental question. How large is the financial stake employees currently hold in their companies? This paper addresses this question using data from the Datastream database,...

This paper evaluates the intensity of the value-maximization incentives for average employees generated through wage, salary, and bonus mechanisms. This is accomplished through estimation of the elasticity of average employee hourly compensation with respect to changes in firm performance. This...

According to empirical evidence, extrinsic incentives often crowd out intrinsic motivation, thus reducing the effort choices of workers. This article presents a simple model illustrating how the introduction of monetary incentives causes a discontinuous reduction in worker effort as well as a...