Questions about compensation structures and incentive effects of pay-for-performance components are important for firms' Human Resource Management as well as for economics in general and labor economics in particular. This paper provides scarce insider econometric evidence on the structure and...

Dieser Beitrag zeigt, dass aktienkursabhängige Entlohnung bei korrelierter Nachfrageentwicklung die Neigung der Manager erhöht, eine implizite Preisabsprache einzuhalten. Die geringeren Gewinne in der Strafphase führen bereits in der Ausbruchsperiode zu einem niedrigeren Aktienkurs und damit...

Building on a unique panel data set of German Prime Standard companies for the period 2005-2008, this paper investigates the influencing factors of both director compensation levels and structure, i.e. the probability of performance-based compensation. Drawing on agency theory arguments and...

It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a “representative” Swiss executive and extend the certainty- equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002) to...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

This paper examines how CEO pay is related to firm size and to firm performance in Finland by using new individual-level compensation data in 1996-2002. We find robust evidence that CEO average compensation has increased substantially between 1996 and 2002. For example, the ratio between CEO and...

This paper shows that it is profitable for a firm to hire an overoptimistic manager to commit to a certain investment strategy in an R&D tournament situation. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, all firms delegate to overoptimistic managers, where the optimal degree of overoptimism depends on...

This paper asks whether adversity spurs the introduction of process innovations and increases the use of managerial incentives by firms. Using a large panel data set of workplaces in Canada, our identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in adversity arising from increased border...

We investigate the determinants of executive pay in a sample of Italian firms. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study on the compensation of Italian executives. We estimate that an increase of real profits per firm by 1 billion lire increases the pay of top executives by only 504...