We investigate whether bank performance during the recent credit crisis is related to chief executive officer (CEO) incentives before the crisis. We find some evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were better aligned with the interests of shareholders performed worse and no evidence...

This paper studies the earnings management behavior of a manager in a strategic game in which the manager may have incentives to avoid earnings below the analysts' consensus forecast and the analysts aiming to provide accurate forecasts behave as rational Bayesians. Our analysis reveals the...

We argue that incentives to take equity risk ("equity incentives") only partially capture incentives to take asset risk ("asset incentives"). This is because leverage, while central to the theory of risk shifting, is not explicitly considered by equity incentives. Employing measures of asset...

We establish that CEOs of companies experiencing volatile industry conditions are more likely to be dismissed. At the same time, industry risk is, accounting for various other factors, unlikely to be associated with CEO compensation other than through dismissal risk. Using this identification...

We reexamine the issue of executive compensation within a general equilibrium production context. Intertemporal optimality places strong restrictions on the form of a representative manager's compensation contract, restrictions that appear to be incompatible with the fact that the bulk of many...

Why do investors keep buying underperforming mutual funds? To address this issue, we develop a one-period principal-agent model with a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. This model shows that the investors perception of the fund plays the key role...

Between 2007 and 2016, 7.6% of publicly listed U.S. firms disclosed that their CEOs had pledged company stock as collateral for a loan. On average, CEOs pledge 38% of their shares. The mean loan value is an economically sizeable $65 million. CEOs use the funds to either double down (6.0%), hedge...