How to address managerial short-termism has been an important issue for companies, regulators, and researchers. In this paper we examine the impact of CEO contractual protection, in the form of employment agreements and severance pay agreements, on managerial short-termism. We find that firms...

The design of CEO incentives is particularly important for firms in financial distress. We compare the resolution of CEO incentive problems in distressed firms between the 1980s versus the 1990s, focusing on how changes in contractual provisions, as well as in the executive labor market,...

Many executives have compensation that is potentially forfeit conditioned on the circumstances surrounding their departure from the firm. We study firms' endogenous decisions to use such compensation "holdbacks" as a bonding device and find that firms with higher executive replacement costs,...