We critically review the emerging literature in Organizational and Personnel Economics concerning the role of managers and management practices. Our focus is on the middle managers who populate the hierarchies between top executives and front-line employees. We are especially concerned with...

We study how individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes. Using new micro-data on the political affiliation of business owners and private-sector workers in Brazil over the 2002-2019 period, we first document the presence of political assortative matching: business...

We study a firm that justifies its novel use of equity derivatives as a cash-flow hedging strategy. Our purpose is to understand the challenge of translating risk management theory into managerial action. Cephalon Inc., a biotech firm, bought a large block of call options on its own stock. If...

This paper attempts to help explain the unforecasted, excess' personal income tax revenues of the last several years. Using panel data on executive compensation in the 1990s, it argues that because the gains on most stock options are treated as ordinary income for tax purposes, rising stock...

Over the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the share of executive compensation paid through stock options. In this paper, we examine the extent to which tax policy has influenced the composition of executive compensation, and discuss the implications of rising stock-based pay...

Although exercise prices for executive stock options can be set either below or above the grant-date market price, in practice virtually all options are granted at the money. We offer an economic rationale for this apparent puzzle, by showing that pay-to-performance incentives for risk-averse...

Under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 123, the grant date value of executive stock options excludes the value of any reload feature because, at the time of writing the standard in 1995, the Financial Accounting Standards Board believed it was not feasible to value a reload...

This paper presents a novel and unique measure of cross-sectional uncertainty constructed from stock options on individual firms. Cross-sectional uncertainty varied little between 1980 and 1995, and subsequently had three distinct peaks -- during the tech boom, the financial crisis, and the...

This paper considers new options on Treasury and stock futures than expire each Wednesday and Friday. I examine the volatilities implied by these options as of the night before expiration, and compare the volatilies just before FOMC days and employment report days with the volatilities on other...

This paper examines how shared capitalism compensation systems - those that link employee pay to company performance - affect diverse employee outcomes. It uses two data sets: the national GSS survey that provides a broad representative view of the extent of the programs; and the NBER Shared...