This paper surveys the recent literature on CEO compensation. The rapid rise in CEO pay over the past 30 years has sparked an intense debate about the nature of the pay-setting process. Many view the high level of CEO compensation as the result of powerful managers setting their own pay. Others...

Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that uncontrolled managers let wages rise above competitive levels. Testing this popular perception has proven difficult, however, because independent variation in the extent of managerial discretion is needed. In this paper, we use states' passage of anti-takeover...

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,...

Constructing compensation schemes for effort in multi-dimensional tasks is complex, particularly when some dimensions are not easily observable. When incentive schemes contractually reward workers for easily observed measures, such as quantity produced, the standard model predicts that...

We study the relation between compensation practices, incentives, and performance in private equity using new data that connect ownership structures, management contracts, and quarterly cash flows for a large sample of buyout and venture capital funds from 1984-2010. Although many critics of...

Due to the limited availability of firm-level compensation data, there is little empirical evidence on the impact of compensation plans on personal productivity. We study an international law firm that moves from high-powered individual incentives towards incentives for "leadership" activities...

Stock prices are more informative when the information has less social value. Speculators with limited resources making costly (private) information production decisions must decide to produce information about some firms and not others. We show that producing and trading on private information...

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...

I estimate the relative magnitudes of worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers. Institutional features imply that voluntary turnover dominates switching in the market for Swedish engineers from 1970--1990. I use data on...