While the literature appeals to efficiency arguments from agency theory to explain the relative rise of CEO equity compensation, prior work has given less focus to CEO pay contracts based on equity and cash incentives that directly (analytically) maximize the total return of firm owners. The...

This paper studies how CEO pay and its composition is shaped by strategic factors related to the firm's capacity to generate rents and value, the uncertainty of its resource advantage, and the competitive interaction between firm stakeholders and top management. This is done using an analytical...

This study examines the relationship between cross-listing and managerial compensation of Chinese firms that concurrently issued A- and B-shares or A- and H-shares during 2001 - 2010. The results show that executive compensation is a positive factor to motivate Chinese A-share firms to...

For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

Many industrialized economies have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality and in the globalization of production since the 1980s. In this paper I propose an open economy model of executive pay to study how offshoring affects the pay level and incentives of top earners. The model introduces a...

Based on a variety of theoretical motivations, this paper first examines empirically whether geography affects CEO compensation and finds that it does. Specifically, if the CEOs of firms that are geographically-close to CEO i's firm experience a 1% increase in salary in a given year, CEO i will...

Among the controversies in corporate governance, perhaps none is more heated or widely debated across society than that of CEO pay. The views that American citizens have on CEO pay is centrally important because public opinion influences political decisions that shape tax, economic, and...

This study considers the implications of excessive non-salary-based executive pay on capital structure during the years 2005 through 2007, directly preceding the 2008 stock market crash. The hypothesis proposes that for firms in the financial sector, executives awarded generous compensation...

The litmus test for an effective compensation program is whether it provides “pay for performance.” While the concept of pay for performance is simple, its implementation is not. In particular, boards must consider not only whether a compensation plan encourages executives to pursue...

Cost heterogeneity is an important source of performance disparity among firms.This heterogeneity conditions the strategic decisions that firms make in the productmarket and can lead to heterogeneity in the design of managerial compensation contracts.I investigate the effect of cost...