To investigate how the possibility of earnings manipulation affects managerial compensation contracts, we study a two period agency setting in which a firm's manager can engage in "window dressing" activities to manipulate reported accounting earnings. Earnings manipulation boosts the reported...

The conventional view suggests that firms should benchmark CEO compensation to absorb systemic risk and to more efficiently incentivize executives to work hard. Yet, empirical research has found only a modest use of benchmarking in compensation contracts. In this paper, I highlight one weakness...

This paper analyzes the impact of agents' risk aversion and other agency parameters on optimal bias in the performance measures used for incentive contracts. Prior research has shown that the limited liability of the agent results in a demand for accounting systems that are stringent compared to...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

This study examines the explicit use of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in executive compensation contracts and the selection of RPE peers. Using S&P 1500 firms' first proxy disclosures under the SEC's 2006 executive compensation disclosure rules, we find that about 25 percent of our...

This paper examines whether the risk-taking incentives induced by performance-based vesting (p-v) compensation influence bank loan contracting and credit ratings. Consistent with our risk-shifting hypothesis, we find that the p-v based compensation, as measured by the proportion of grant date...