We test the widely held assumption that longer restructurings are more costly. In contrast to earlier studies, we use instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of restructuring time and creditor return. Instrumenting proves critical to our finding that creditor recovery rates...

Uncertainty has qualitatively different implications than risk in studying executive incentives. We study the interplay between profitability uncertainty and moral hazard, where profitability is multiplicative with managerial effort. Investors who face greater uncertainty desire faster learning,...

Many U.S. corporations have frozen defined benefit (DB) pension plans, replacing new DB promises with contributions to defined contribution (DC) plans. We estimate expected DB accruals from the age-service and salary distributions of a large sample of U.S. corporate pension plans with more than...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

We analyze the long-run trends in executive compensation using a new panel dataset of top executives in large firms from 1936 to 2005. In sharp contrast to the well-known steep upward trajectory of pay of the past 30 years, the median real value of compensation was remarkably flat from the late...

I document eight novel facts about wage changes and provide a theoretical framework to rationalize them. I then illustrate how this new treatment of data and theoretical framework speak to important secular and cyclical features of the macroeconomy. The evidence put forth in this paper, suggests...

Competitive sorting models of the CEO labor market (e.g., Edmans, Gabaix and Landier (2009)) predict that differences in CEO productive abilities, or "talent", should be an important determinant of CEO pay. However, measuring CEO talent empirically represents a major challenge. In this paper, we...

We show that an activist's reputation is a critical determinant of the success of their campaigns. We model reputation as target managers' belief about the activist's willingness to initiate a proxy fight. Our model indicates reputation, rather than stake size, induces managers to settle without...

If managers maximize the payoffs of their shareholders rather than firm profits, then it may be anticompetitive for a shareholder to own competing firms. This is because a manager?s objective function may place weight on profits of competitors who are held by the same shareholder. Recent...

This paper examines the labor market for CEOs in the financial sector from 1988 to 2007, using a new hand-collected sample of 1,655 CEO successions. We document that there is a significant role of outside successions, as about one out of two successions involves an outside hire. In addition,...