Prior CEO turnover literature characterizes the board's decision as a choice between retaining versus replacing the CEO. We focus instead on the CEO's decision rights and introduce a third option in which the incumbent CEO is removed but retained on the board for an extended period, which we...

The design of CEO incentives is particularly important for firms in financial distress. We compare the resolution of CEO incentive problems in distressed firms between the 1980s versus the 1990s, focusing on how changes in contractual provisions, as well as in the executive labor market,...

Starting in 1995, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) transformed a bureaucratic healthcare system into a performance driven patient focused integrated health-care network. The VHA’s experience may offer lessons for private and public sector providers as the U.S. explores alternative...

To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

As part of a federal government initiative to increase efficiency and quality, in 1996 the United States' VHA (Veterans Health Administration) radically restructured its organizational design and management processes. This study uses 1992-1998 clinical, workload and financial data to examine the...