We study derivative instruments that corporate insiders use to diversify and hedge their equity ownership. Our evidence suggests that boards might allow use of these instruments in order to mitigate agency costs associated with overvalued equity and high equity-based pay. These instruments are...

This paper studies how firms can efficiently incentivize supervisors to truthfully report employee performance. To this end, I develop a dynamic principal-supervisor-agent model. The supervisor is either selfish or altruistic towards the agent, which is observable to the agent but not to the...

This paper suggests a holistic framework for analysis of agrarian contracts and investigates the contractual structure in transitional Bulgarian agriculture. Firstly, it incorporates the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law,...

This article examines the influence of equity capital ownership on human resource management practices. The empirical analysis uses the 2004-2005 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (REPONSE survey), based on a sample of 2,930 establishments with 20 workers or more, representative of the...

We solve for the optimal contract when agents are reciprocal, demonstrating that generous compensation can substitute for performance-based pay. Our results suggest several factors that make firms more likely to use reciprocal incentives. Reciprocity is most powerful when output is a poor signal...

We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...

Currently, CEO pay is determined by a company's board of directors, subject to limited shareholder approval in certain circumstances. However, as Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried have argued, directors and CEOs do not necessarily engage in real arms length bargaining over CEO pay. Instead, CEOs...

Most corporate governance research focuses on the behavior of chief executive officers, board members,institutional shareholders, and other similar parties. Little research focuses on the impact of executives whose primary responsibility is to enforce and shape corporate governance inside the...

Building on archival, anecdotal, and survey evidence on managers׳ roles in accounting manipulations, I develop an agency model to examine the effects of a CEO׳s power to pressure a CFO to bias a performance measure, like earnings. This power has implications for incentive compensation,...

The questions of whether there ever existed excessive risk-taking incentives from executive compensation in the financial industry, and whether top executives of financial services firms actually responded to such excessive incentives that eventually led to the crisis remain unanswered. The...