This paper reviews recent evidence analyzing the link between earnings management and corporate tax avoidance and considers the implications for how policymakers should evaluate the financial reporting environment facing firms. A real-world tax shelter is dissected to illustrate how tax shelter...

This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between managerial incentives and firm risk using a hand-collected database of 3307 executive year observations. We find that the relation between pay performance sensitivity and firm risk exhibits a nonlinear relationship with firm size: for...

In the wake of the Financial Accounting Standard Board's decision to require firms that grant employee stock options (ESOs) to treat such options as an expense, many large and sophisticated firms are switching from ESOs to restricted stock. Restricted stock - stock granted to an employee as part...

This paper studies how firms tie CEO compensation to firms' stock market performance. I demonstrate that in theory and in practice there is a tradeoff between giving CEOs incentives and forcing them to hold an un-diversified position in the firm. Unlike the results of the existing literature,...

We examine a sample of firms that adopt quot;target ownership plans,quot; under which managers are required to own a minimum amount of stock. We find that prior to plan adoption, such firms exhibit low managerial equity ownership and low stock price performance. Managerial equity ownership...

Over the past decade, executive compensation has become a controversial topic. Increasingly, corporate boards of directors are confronted by angry shareholder groups over the size and composition of executive pay packages. One of the most important focal points for these tensions arises when...

This paper investigates how corporate risk management policy and managerial compensation contracts are jointly determined when hedging policy can be a source of agency problems. The optimal hedging policy and stock-based compensation contract are characterized in terms of the firm's abandonment...

Firms can reprice employee stock options to realign performance and retention incentives when stock price declines cause options to have insignificant expected values. Six-and-one option exchanges allow firms to avoid recognizing compensation expenses when repricing options, but appear unable to...

This paper proposes to exploit a reform in legal rules of corporate governance to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. In particular, we refer to a major shift in the legal and institutional environment, the reform of the German joint-stock...

The relationship between CEO pay and performance has been much analyzed in the management and economics literature. This study analyzes the structure of executive compensation in family and non-family firms. In line with predictions of agency theory, it is found that the share of base salary is...