Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Among other benefits, averaging reduces...

The relation between aggregate earnings and aggregate returns is complex and not fully understood. For example, in contrast to firm-level relations, prior literature finds aggregate earnings changes and aggregate stock returns are negatively related. This paper constructs new measures of...

This paper shows that there is a natural trade-off when designing market-based executive compensation. The benefit of market-based pay is that the stock price aggregates speculators' dispersed information and therefore takes a picture of managerial performance before the long-term value of a...

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past...

Predicted stock issuers (PSIs) are firms with expected “high-investment and low-profit” (HILP) profiles that earn unusually low returns. We carefully document important features of PSI firms to provide insights on the economic mechanism behind the HILP phenomenon. Top-PSI firms are...