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...

We find that social capital, as captured by secular norms and networks surrounding corporate headquarters, is negatively associated with total and equity-based CEO compensation. This relation is robust in tests for omitted variables, in instrumental-variable regressions, and in regressions using...

We study the pay of UK universities chief executives ("vice-chancellors") over a ten year period. Although there is a correlation between pay and performance, with better performing institutions paying higher salaries, we find limited evidence that this relationship is causal; that is, we find...

Provides in-depth analysis of excessive executive compensation at the 20 wealthiest Massachusetts private colleges and universities during 2008-09, the academic year of the financial crisis. Analyzes both disclosed and undisclosed compensation packages as well as income inequality between highly...

Consider a firm owned by shareholders with heterogeneous beliefs and run by a manager. Shareholders can trade contingent claims in a complete asset market. The manager is given a contract so that at equilibrium she chooses the plan preferred by shareholders. We show that the contract should...

The corporate governance debate has focused recently on executive compensation. While defenders of the status quo assert that CEO compensation - and corporate governance generally - is efficient, critics contend that boards have been captured by powerful CEOs who demand excessive pay...

This paper investigates whether and how social-psychological mechanisms, namely reciprocity, demographic similarity, and similar experiences, affect CEO compensation packages with respect to the levels of total, fixed, and short- and mid-term compensation and the variable proportion of the...

Understanding executive compensation and its effects helps design better organizations. Research on this area is thus of paramount importance. For large US companies, the ExecuComp database offers access to standardized and comprehensive executive compensation data. Hence, research on executive...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executives to theories based on...