Recent theory suggests that firms incorporate synergistic interrelationships among executives into optimal incentive design (Edmans et al. 2013). We focus on Pay Performance Sensitivities (PPS) and use dispersion in PPS across top executives as a proxy for the incentive design component shaped...

We investigate the effect of the career concerns of young CEOs and of female CEOs on their willingness to issue voluntary earnings forecasts. We argue that the labor market's perception about a young CEO's uncertain talent leads to a stronger desire to establish a good reputation by issuing more...

Although the standard principal-agent model predicts a negative relation between incentive strength (i.e., pay-performance-sensitivity or PPS) and firm risk, the empirical evidence is mixed (Prendergast, 2002). This study revisits this prediction. Using carefully selected litigation events to...

This study examines changes in CEOs' incentive to manage their firms' earnings during their tenure as CEO. We show that earnings are more likely to be overstated in the early years than in the later years of CEOs' service, and that this association is weaker for firms with greater institutional...

This study examines the effect of managers' career concerns on tax avoidance using the staggered recognition by state courts of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD), a trade secret protection doctrine which places greater restrictions on managers from joining or forming a rival company. We...