There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to quot;managerial powerquot; or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S....

Using geometric illustrations, we investigate what implications of portfolio optimization in equilibrium can be generated by the simple mean-variance framework, under margin borrowing restrictions. First, we investigate the case of uniform marginability on all risky assets. It is shown that...

The present research covering the latest residential boom and bust cycle highlights the lack of uniform or constant time invariant wealth, housing and income relations. More important, wealth composition is shown to be a significant determinant of consumption. The marginal effects of housing...

This paper provides an update to Skinner's (1987) predicted consumption measure for households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1980 to 2003. More than 80% of the variance in total non-durable consumption is explained by three expenditure components.

We conduct an analysis of recent trends on the subfields of study that doctoral students in economics choose for their dissertations. By investigating data on the JEL classification codes of dissertations reported by the Journal of Economic Literature from 1991 to 2007, we find that the trends...

type="main" xml:id="ecin12094-abs-0001" The influential economic theory of intergenerational transfers predicts a negative connection between credit constraints and intergenerational mobility of consumption. Existing work has used bequest receipt to signal a parent's access to credit markets...

The dissertation is focused on studying the behavior of aggregate asset market and its relationship to real economic activity. Chapter 1 offers a new empirical perspective on the relationship between the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns. Chapter 2 builds a general equilibrium...

We document that credit rating changes significantly affect chief executive officer's (CEO's) incentives. Modeling both credit rating changes and CEO incentive changes as two jointly endogenous processes, we present strong evidence that CEO incentives increase subsequent to credit downgrades...

We study whether a risk-based pricing source can generate momentum profits. We show both analytically and empirically that the Fama-French factor-adjusted return, or alphas, contains a missing risk-based component. A momentum strategy based on a proxy for this missing-factor component generates...