Shareholder proposals are increasingly important tools for corporate reformers, yet courts, policy makers, and scholars are concerned that proposals may be used "opportunistically" as bargaining chips by activists to extract side payments from management. This paper investigates whether labor...

We examine the economic consequences of the recent adoption of SFAS 123(R) in the United States. Consistent with the conjectures of prior research, our results show that the removal of favorable accounting treatment for stock options post SFAS 123(R) results in a switch from stock options to...

The empirical literature on the effect of dispersion of executive remuneration (i.e., the intensity of a tournament structure) on the comparative performance of companies is mixed. Studies on US data tend to find strong positive effects but non-US studies tend to fail to find an effect. This...

This paper seeks to understand the role that peer comparisons play in the determination of executive compensation. I exploit a recent change in the Securities and Exchange Commission's regulations that requires firms to disclose the peer companies used for determining the compensation of their...

Classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to counteract excessive risk aversion in agents. In a setting where any kind of risk taking is suboptimal for shareholders, we show that excessive risk taking may occur for one of two reasons: risk...

This paper investigates executive earnings-based bonuses in a general equilibrium economy. Unlike the existing study, combining the two frameworks in the fields of accounting and economics allows us to examine different earnings characteristics determined by the correlation between...

In this study we analyze how CEO risk incentives affect the efficiency of research and development (R&D) investments. We examine a sample of 843 cases in which firms increase their R&D investments by an economically significant amount over the period of 1995–2006. We find that firms with...

Theoretical literature (Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Edmans and Liu, 2011) argues that inside debt – pension benefits and deferred compensation – has debt-like payoffs, and can therefore curb executives’ excessive risk-taking incentives created by equity holdings. We test this theory in the...

Companies can increase executive compensation by allowing dividends to be paid on unvested restricted stocks grants, also known as stealth compensation. Examining all S&P 500 firms over the period 2003–2007, we find that more than half of the dividend paying firms allow this practice. We look...

Golden parachutes (GPs) have attracted substantial attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. We find that GPs are associated with higher expected acquisition premiums and that this association is at least partly due to the effect of GPs on executive incentives....