We use firms’ discretionary choices in the CEO pay ratio disclosure to examine corporate decisions under social pressure. Reported pay ratios are significantly lower when firms use complex methods to identify the median employee, whose total pay is the denominator in the ratio. Firms choose...

Motivated by the dual agency environment in founding family firms, we examine how family firms provide compensation incentives to nonfamily executives. Nonfamily executives receive weaker risk-taking incentives and pay-for-performance incentives when family ownership is high and when family...

We examine how incentive compensation for nonfamily executives in family firms differs from incentive compensation for executives in nonfamily firms. Nonfamily executives in family firms receive significantly less performance-based pay and equity-based pay. Family monitoring, risk aversion, and...

We use a hand-collected sample of 1,628 S&P 1500 firms and more than 12,000 executives to examine how family firms compensate nonfamily executives. Family firms comprise a large percentage of firms around the world, and most of their executives are not members of the founding family. Moreover,...

We analyze the costs and benefits of clawback provisions that enable firms to recover incentive compensation from top management if financials are restated. In a simple contracting model, we find that a clawback provision effectively lengthens the horizon of incentives and curbs misreporting....

Family firms comprise more than one third of U.S. public firms. They differ significantly from widely-held firms in their promotion-based tournament environment and agency conflicts. These differences are likely to affect the design and efficacy of compensation incentives. However, most existing...