This paper conducts surveys that document CFO perspectives on corporate planning, corporate investment, capital … structure, payout, and the goal of the firm. Current policy choices are compared to CFO survey data from two decades prior …-changing world, so managers use simple rules to make incremental improvements and they stick with rules that have worked well enough …

While prior empirical work and much public attention have focused on the opportunistic timing of executives' grants, we … information. We find that directors' luck has been correlated with executives' luck. Furthermore, grant events were more likely to …

We study the relation between corporate governance and opportunistic timing of CEO option grants via backdating or … opportunistic timing. Lucky grants were more likely when the board did not have a majority of independent directors and/or the CEO … had longer tenure -- factors associated with increased influence of the CEO on pay-setting. We find no evidence that gains …

executive positions - CEO, CFO, COO and others. We classify the thirty candidate characteristics with four primary factors … score higher on these factors; CFO candidates score lower. Conditional on being a candidate, executives with greater …: general ability, execution vs. interpersonal, charisma vs. analytic, and strategic vs. managerial. CEO candidates tend to …

the level of CEO and other top executive pay over time and across firms, the changing composition of pay; and the strength … by executives, and institutional factors such as regulation, taxation, and accounting policy. We confront each hypothesis …

decades. Employing comprehensive data on top executives at major U.S. companies, we show that their compensation is increasing … executives at firms with poor corporate governance, as one would expect if globalization has enhanced rent-capture opportunities …

We examine how an increase in stock option grants affects CEO risk-taking. The overall net effect of option grants is …

Would moving to relative performance contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and performance? To address this …. Using new employer-employee matched datasets we find that the CEO pay-performance relationship remains asymmetric: pay … when the CEO has equity awards that explicitly condition on firm performance relative to peer firms in the same sector. A …

The dramatic rise in CEO compensation during the 1990s and early 2000s is a longstanding puzzle. In this paper, we show … the tech boom. Further, other forms of CEO compensation did not adjust to offset the dramatic growth in the value of …

CEO takes advantage of these effects by cashing out shortly after the news releases …