In contrast to the recent past, there is now widespread concern about the apparent excesses of some pay structures in corporate businesses. Top pay has risen much faster than average levels of pay in the last twenty years. This is in part the consequence of globalisation and developments in...

This paper identifies a limit to arbitrage that arises from the fact that a firm's fundamental value is endogenous to the act of exploiting the arbitrage. Trading on private information reveals this information to managers and helps them improve their real decisions, in turn enhancing...

This paper studies the effect of stock liquidity on blockholders' choice of governance mechanisms. We focus on hedge funds as they are unconstrained by legal restrictions and business ties, and thus have all governance channels at their disposal. Since the threat of governance, not just actual...

This paper presents a market equilibrium model of CEO assignment, pay and incentives under risk aversion and heterogeneous moral hazard. Each of the three outcomes can be summarized by a single closed-form equation. In assignment models without moral hazard, allocation depends only on firm size...

This paper identifies a class of multiperiod agency problems in which the optimal contract is tractable (attainable in closed form). By modeling the noise before the action in each period, we force the contract to provide correct incentives state-by-state, rather than merely on average. This...

We study optimal executive compensation in a dynamic framework that incorporates many important features of the CEO job absent from a static setting. Shocks to firm value may weaken the incentive effects of securities over time (e.g. drive options out of the money). The CEO can undo the contract...

This paper studies the corporate governance and asset pricing implications of investors owning blocks in multiple firms. Common wisdom is that multi-firm ownership weakens governance because the blockholder is spread too thinly. We show that this need not be the case. In a single-firm benchmark,...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the different channels through which blockholders (large shareholders) engage in corporate governance. In classical models, blockholders exert governance through direct intervention in a firm’s operations, otherwise known as...

This paper links the CEO’s concerns for the current stock price to reductions in real investment. These concerns depend on the amount of equity he intends to sell in the short-term, but actual equity sales are an endogenous decision. We use the amount of stock and options scheduled to vest in...

We show that CEOs strategically time corporate news releases to coincide with months in which their equity vests. These vesting months are determined by equity grants made several years prior, and thus unlikely driven by the current information environment. CEOs reallocate news into vesting...