This paper surveys the recent literature on CEO compensation. The rapid rise in CEO pay over the past 30 years has sparked an intense debate about the nature of the pay-setting process. Many view the high level of CEO compensation as the result of powerful managers setting their own pay. Others...

Previous literature shows that income taxation significantly affects the behavior of high-income earners and business owners. However, it is still unclear how much of the response is due to changes in effort and other real economic activity, and how much is caused by tax avoidance and tax...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executives to theories based on...

Several recent studies show that the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is not a sufficient statistic for the welfare costs of taxation due to factors such as taxbase shifting. This paper provides an additional argument demonstrating the non-sufficiency of the ETI, namely tax deductions....

Incentive compensation induces correlation between the portfolio of managers and the cash flow of the firms they manage. This correlation exposes managers to risk and hence gives them an incentive to hedge against the poor performance of their firms. We study the agency problem between...

This paper identifies globalization as a factor behind the rapid increase in executive compensation and inequality over the last few decades. Employing comprehensive data on top executives at major U.S. companies, we show that compensation is higher at more global firms. We find that pay...

We study the responsiveness of small and medium-sized firms to a small-business corporate income tax schedule using population-wide administrative data from South Africa. We find sizeable bunching of firms at the corporate income thresholds where the corporate tax rate increases, implying active...

This paper estimates the tax-price elasticity of giving using UK administrative tax return data, exploiting variation from a large tax reform. We estimate both the intensive and extensive-margin elasticity, using a novel instrumental variables strategy. Then, we derive new conditions to evaluate...

This paper examines the effects of a unilateral reform of the redistribution policy in an economy open to international trade. We set up a general equilibrium trade model with heterogeneous agents allowing for country asymmetries. We show that under international trade compared to autarky, a...

Theoretical discussion on compensating mechanisms involving the Pareto criterion that address inequality rather than absolute welfare is non-existent in trade literature. In a simple HOS model we consider tax-transfer policies that keep the pre-trade degree of inequality unchanged between...