The rise in executive compensation has triggered a great amount of public controversy and academic research. Critics have referred to the salaries paid to managers as 'pay without performance', while defenders have countered that the large salaries can be explained by a 'war for talents'. This...

A rarely studied trend in corporate governance is the increasing tendency to fill CEO openings through external hires rather than through internal promotions: Kevin J. Murphy and Ján Zábojník (2004) show that the proportion of outside hires has doubled and their pay premium almost quadrupled...

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of...

Director compensation has become a fashionable topic: Cross-nationally, the earnings of executives and non-executive directors have risen significantly in recent years. Academic literature offers two hypotheses for this trend, a ?fat cat? and an ?optimal-contract? explanation. Proponents of the...

The financial crisis made apparent the fact that managers and the boards of banks had failed to see the implications of irrational behavior and had ignored the risk associated with group think. Taking data from Switzerland our study shows that there is an increasing homogeneity of management and...