We offer a novel view of employee discounts and in kind compensation. In our theory, bundling perks and cash compensation allows a firm to extract information rents from employees who have private information about their preferences for the perk and about their outside opportunities. We show...

We examine optimal information flows between a manager and a worker who is in charge of evaluating a parameter of interest, e.g. the value of a project. The manager may possesses information about the parameter, and, if informed, may divulge her information to the worker. We show that...

This paper models two key roles of subjective performance evaluations: their incentive role and their feedback role. The paper shows that the feedback role makes subjective pay feasible even without repeated interaction, as long as there exists some verifiable measure of performance. It also...

Standard principal-agent theory predicts that large firms should not use employee stock options and other stock-based compensation to provide incentives to non-executive employees. Yet, business practitioners appear to believe that stock-based compensation improves incentives, and mounting...

The corporate finance literature suggests that a financially constrained firm invests less than an identical unconstrained firm. This does not imply that financial frictions cause firms to invest less than they would in a frictionless economy. When firms compete for investment funds, an increase...

This paper presents a theory of the allocation of authority in an organization in which centralization is limited by the agent's ability to disobey the principal. We show that workers are given more authority when they are costly to replace or do not mind looking for another job, even if they...

Standard models of promotion tournaments assume that firms can commit to arbitrary tournament prizes. In this paper, a firm's ability to adjust tournament prizes is constrained by the outside labor market, through the wages other firms are willing to offer to the promoted and unpromoted workers....

This paper reconciles two pronounced trends in U.S. corporate governance: the increase in pay levels for top executives, and the increasing prevalence of appointing CEOs through external hiring rather than internal promotions. We propose that these trends reflect a shift in the relative...

This article identifies a new type of cost associated with centralization. If workers are liquidity constrained, it may be less costly to motivate a worker who is allowed to work on his own idea than a worker who is forced to follow the manager's idea. Thus, it may be optimal to let workers...

Profit-maximizing owners of firms may find it optimal to provide managers with incentives to maximize sales in addition to profits. This influences the outcome of the bargaining game between workers and managers over workers' wages and helps to solve the problem of underinvestment by workers in...