Prior research shows that firms generating earnings growth by improving profitability create shareholder value, while firms generating earnings growth through investment destroy value. This paper examines whether compensation committees consider this while determining CEO compensation. We first...

We develop a measurement-error framework for assessing the quality of relative-performance metrics designed to filter out the systematic component of performance, and analyze relative total shareholder return (rTSR)-the predominant metric market participants use to isolate managers'...

We document that CEO cash compensation is twice as sensitive to negative stock returns as it is to positive stock returns. Since stock returns include both unrealized gains and unrealized losses, we expect cash compensation to be less sensitive to stock returns when returns contain unrealized...

Macroeconomic risks only partially capture the profitability premium, while adding a misvaluation factor based on investor sentiment helps explain a substantial amount of it. The profitability premium mainly exists in firms whose market valuations are inconsistent with their profitability and...

Macroeconomic risks only partially capture the profitability premium, while adding a misvaluation factor based on investor sentiment helps explain a substantial amount of it. The profitability premium mainly exists in firms whose market valuations are inconsistent with their profitability and...

This study, through empirical evidence of 3,081 US firms during the period of 1992-2009, shows a strong causal relation between different CEO compensation components and firms' investment policy and firm risk. Specifically, the proportion of CEO option-based compensation is positively and...

Influenced by their compensation plans, CEOs make their own luck through decisions that affect future firm risk. After adopting a relative performance evaluation (RPE) plan, total and idiosyncratic risk are higher, and the correlation between firm and industry performance is lower. The opposite...

I invoke agency theory to evaluate how top executives' compensation contracts are structured, conditional on risk in the firm's operating environment, focusing on the total, fixed, and variable components. The results suggest that companies exert some effort to adhere to agency theoretic...

It is well known that the market-to-book equity ratio and total asset growth are negatively associated with future stock returns. Much less known is that the predictabilities are related through the mispricing channel. We show that the growth-value anomaly is governed by ex-ante total asset...

It is well known that the market-to-book equity ratio and total asset growth are negatively associated with future stock returns. Much less known is that the predictabilities are related through the mispricing channel. We show that the growth-value anomaly is governed by ex-ante total asset...