Wir analysieren das Gesetz zur Angemessenheit der Vorstandsvergütung. Ferner arbeiten wir einige aufgrund wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Überlegungen zu erwartende Probleme heraus und prognostizieren mögliche ökonomische Auswirkungen des Gesetzes. Des Weiteren gehen wir im Rahmen einer...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

Existing theories of a firm\'s optimal capital structure seem to fail in explaining why many healthy and profitable firms rely heavily on equity financing, even though benefits associated with debt (like tax shields) appear to be high and the bankruptcy risk low. This holds in particular for...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...

I show that deterministic dynamic contracts between a principal and an agent are always at least as profitable to the principal as stochastic ones, if the so-called first-order approach in dynamic mechanism design is satisfied. The principal commits, while the agent\'s type evolution follows a...

We study an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determine the organization\'s aggregate efficiency. Under centralization, eliciting the agents\' private information may induce the principal to manipulate aggregate...

We analyze a relational contracting problem, in which the principal has private information about the future value of the relationship. In order to reduce bonus payments, the principal is tempted to claim that the value of the future relationship is lower than it actually is. To induce...

Consider managers evaluating their employees\' performances. Should managers justify their subjective evaluations? Suppose a manager\'s evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal\'s scope for distorting her evaluation of the employee. I show...

Although stock options are commonly observed in chief executive o±cer (CEO) compensation contracts, there is theoretical controversy about whether stock options are part of the optimal contract. Using a sample of Fortune 500 companies, we solve an agency model calibrated to the company-specific...

Consider an agent (manager, artist, etc.) who has imperfect private information about his productivity. At the beginning of his career (period 1, short run"), the agent chooses among publicly observable actions that generate imperfect signals of his productivity. The actions can be ranked...