Critics of U.S. executive pay practices have raised four major concerns: (1) executive pay is too high; (2) CEO contracts do not provide strong enough incentives to increase value (i.e., there is too little pay-for-performance); (3) options and other equity-based pay provide windfalls, large...

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, US executive compensation has, once again, come under fire from regulators, politicians, the financial press, the general public, and some academics. Although the critiques are varied, many identify the level of pay and performance-based incentives as...

We develop an algorithm that mimics the relative performance evaluation (“RPE”) peer selection process used for CEOs’ incentive plans. Our algorithm constructs the portfolio of peer firms that exhibits the highest in-sample stock performance correlation with the focal firm, which we then...

US CEOs hold a large amount of equity that is not explicitly constrained by ownership guidelines or vesting requirements. Although the average CEO receives a risk premium in his annual pay for holding unconstrained equity, most CEOs hold more equity than is compensated by the risk premium in...

Prior turnover literature documents that poor performance leads a board of directors to terminate the CEO, but does not explore the underlying causes of the CEO's poor performance. Recognizing that terminated CEOs have often been successful earlier in their tenure, we conjecture that changes in...

We examine the press' role in monitoring and influencing executive compensation practice using more than 11,000 press articles about CEO compensation from 1994 to 2002. Negative press coverage is more strongly related to excess annual pay than to raw annual pay, suggesting a sophisticated...

Stock and option compensation and the level of managerial equity incentives are aspects of corporate governance that are especially controversial to shareholders, institutional activists, and governmental regulators. Similar to much of the corporate finance and corporate governance literature,...

We empirically examine standard agency predictions about how performance measures are optimally weighted to provide CEO incentives. Consistent with prior empirical research, we document that the relative weight on price and non-price performance measures in CEO cash pay is a decreasing function...