CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract...

All that we know about the CEO labour market in China comes from studies of public listed companies and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper is the first to examine the operation of the CEO labour market across all sectors of the Chinese economy. We do so using World Bank enterprise data...

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal–agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. We show that they are an important feature in today's CEO labour market in...

The world-wide inflation in executive compensation in recent years has been accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of long-term incentives. This article demonstrates how the subjectively perceived value of long-term incentives is affected by risk aversion, uncertainty aversion, and time...

This paper estimates the effects of Say-on-Pay (SoP); a policy that increases shareholder "voice" by providing shareholders with a regular vote on executive pay. We apply a regression discontinuity design to the votes on shareholder-sponsored SoP proposals. Adopting SoP leads to large increases...

The aim of this paper is to study the effects of product market competition on the explicit compensation packages that firms offer to their executives. In order to measure the net effect of competition we use two different identification strategies. The first exploits cross sectoral variation in...

This paper studies the effect of deregulation and increased product market competition on the compensation packages that firms offer to their executives. We use a panel of US executives in the nineties and exploit the deregulation episodes in the banking and financial sectors as quasi-natural...

This paper examines trends in the distribution of household wealth in Great Britain from 1995 to 2005 using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The data show that wealth is very unevenly distributed and reveal a widening absolute gap over the period between wealthier households and those...

Cash transfers (benefits and tax credits) are crucial to the way that inequalities develop over time. This paper looks at how Labour’s aims, policies and achievements on poverty and inequality related to its reforms of and spending on cash transfers. - Labour’s aims for poverty and...

This paper argues that our understanding of income and poverty dynamics benefits from taking a life cycle perspective. A person¿s age and family circumstances ¿ the factors that shape their life cycle ¿ affect the likelihood of experiencing key life events, such as partnership formation,...