In their recent book, "Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation", the authors of this article provided a comprehensive critique of U.S. executive pay practices and the corporate governance processes that produce them, and then offered a number of proposals for...

This article develops a model of a self-fulfilling credit market freeze and uses it to study alternative governmental responses to such a crisis. We study an economy in which operating firms are interdependent, where their success depends on the ability of other operating firms to obtain...

This paper provides an overview of the main theoretical elements and empirical underpinnings of a "managerial power" approach to executive compensation. Under this approach, the design of executive compensation is viewed not only as an instrument for addressing the agency problem between...

We investigate the relation between the CEO Pay Slice (CPS)--the fraction of the aggregate compensation of the top-five executive team captured by the Chief Executive Officer--and the value, performance, and behavior of public firms. The CPS could reflect the relative importance of the CEO as...

We study the relation between opportunistic timing of option grants and corporate governance failures, focusing on "lucky" grants awarded at the lowest price of the grant month. Option grant practices were designed to provide lucky grants not only to executives but also to independent directors....

We model how three groups--insiders in existing public companies, institutional investors, and entrepreneurs planning to take firms public--compete for influence over politicians setting the level of investor protection. We identify factors that push toward suboptimal investor protection,...

This article, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance cosponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven articles on corporate...

Companies, investors, and regulators around the world are now seeking to tie executives' payoffs to long-term results and avoid rewarding executives for short-term gains. Focusing on equity-based compensation, the primary component of top executives' pay, the authors analyze how such...

This paper, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance co-sponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate...