This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General...

People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that previous transactions play an important role in shaping perceptions of...

Executive pay fell during the 1940s, marking the last notable decrease in the past 70 years. We study this decline using a new panel dataset on the remuneration of top executives in 246 firms. We find that government regulation--including explicit salary restrictions and taxation--had, at best,...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Important facts about compensation are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable...

This paper finds that globalization is contributing to the rapid increase in executive compensation over the last few decades. Employing comprehensive data on top executives at major U.S. companies, we show that their compensation is increasing with exports and foreign direct investment, as well...

Investment decisions require trading off current expenditures against future revenues. If revenues extend far enough into the future, the executives responsible for designing long-run investment policy may no longer be in office by the time all the revenues are realized. We present evidence...

What determines CEO incentives? A confusion exists among both academics and practitioners about how to measure the strength of CEO incentives, and how to reconcile the enormous differences in pay sensitivities between executives in large and small firms. We show that while one measure of CEO...

This paper provides an overview of the main theoretical elements and empirical underpinnings of a managerial power' approach to executive compensation. Under this approach, the design of executive compensation is viewed not only as an instrument for addressing the agency problem between managers...

Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosities of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. In this paper, we test whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences. We exploit the quot;experimentquot; of German separation and...