This paper tests the proposition that higher tournament incentives will result in greater risk-taking by senior managers in order to increase their chance of promotion to the rank of CEO. Measuring tournament incentives as the pay gap between the CEO and the next layer of senior managers, we...

The sensitivity of stock options' payoff to return volatility, or vega, provides risk-averse CEOs with an incentive to increase their firms' risk more by increasing systematic rather than idiosyncratic risk. This effect manifests because any increase in the firm's systematic risk can be hedged...

Does corporate governance affect the timing of large investment projects? Hazard model estimates suggest strong shareholder governance may deter managers from pursuing large investments. Controlling for investment opportunities, firms with good governance experience longer spells between large...

We study changes in chief executive officer (CEO) contracts when firms transition from public ownership with dispersed owners to private ownership with strong principals in the form of private equity sponsors. The most significant changes are that a significant portion of equity grants...

We analyze the factors that drive exercise price policy for executive option plans (ESOPs) and their scope in a country where firms are not subject to the tax and accounting considerations that seem to have led to the dominance of at-the-money options in the US Our “unbounded” data for...

We build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases in producers' hedging demand or speculators' capital constraints increase hedging costs via price-pressure on futures....

We study the exposure of the US corporate bond returns to liquidity shocks of stocks and Treasury bonds over the period 1973–2007 in a regime-switching model. In one regime, liquidity shocks have mostly insignificant effects on bond prices, whereas in another regime, a rise in illiquidity...

We develop a new approach to approximating asset prices in the context of continuous-time models. For any pricing model that lacks a closed-form solution, we provide a closed-form approximate solution, which relies on the expansion of the intractable model around an “auxiliary” one. We...

I study the effect of chief executive officer (CEO) optimism on CEO compensation. Using data on compensation in US firms, I provide evidence that CEOs whose option exercise behavior and earnings forecasts are indicative of optimistic beliefs receive smaller stock option grants, fewer bonus...

Current research shows that firms are more likely to benchmark against peers that pay their Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) higher compensation, reflecting self serving behavior. We propose an alternative explanation: the choice of highly paid peers represents a reward for unobserved CEO talent....