Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one’s performance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher when individuals are...

CEO compensation rarely gets cut, and almost every component of it increased in early 2000. I consider a two-period contracting problem in which a board privately knows its CEO's matching quality with the firm that changes over time. The board faces a trade-off: Revealing good information makes...

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where standard preferences predict a fully...

An essential ingredient in models of career concerns is ex ante uncertainty about an agent's type. This paper shows how career concerns can arise even in the absence of any such ex ante uncertainty, if the unobservable actions that an agent takes influence his future productivity. By...

We show that firms may benefit from allowing some earnings management, because it can make noisy signals more informative. We model a firm that cannot observe a manager's cost of effort, her effort choice, and whether she manipulated a publicly observable signal. An optimal contract links...

In this study, we determine why CEOs from lobbying firms receive higher pay compared to their non-lobbying peers. We investigate whether insider trading can explain high CEO pay. Using hand-collected firm-level lobbying data, we examine whether CEOs from lobbying firms engage in insider trading...

We examine how performance management practices that render employee accomplishments transparent in an organization depend on employees’ hierarchical level. We consider a principal-agent model of an organization where the principal contracts directly with a group of higher-level agent-workers...

How much does firm intangibility amplify CEOs' persistent private information and reduce firms' public listing propensity? We develop a model of competing public and private investors financing firms heterogeneously exposed to persistent private cashflows. Equilibrium financing is driven by...