Prevailing executive pay practices rest on fallacious assumptions about performance attribution, the nature of alignment, and the psychology of incentives, and have numerous unintended consequences that are value-destructive particularly for long term and diversified shareholders. The focus of...

We investigate an emerging pay-performance activism under a natural setting of performance-focused shareholder proposals rule (PSPs) (Rule 14a-8) established by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for top management compensation. We find that: (1) PSP sponsors successfully identify...

Executive compensation serves as a metric by which investors measure the quality of a firm's governance. In this paper, I explore how the signaling role of executive compensation impacts the compensation decisions of boards. I show that reputational concerns often cause boards to adopt pay...

Maintaining economic output during COVID-19 pandemic can result in benefits for a firm's shareholders but comes at a potential cost to public health. Using novel retail store-level data, we examine how a CEO's political leanings, measured by political donations, impacts this tradeoff. We...

Despite differences of opinion regarding what to include as a “top risk” today, many executives agree that 2021 and beyond will likely be a period of uncommonly broad-based risks. Given the breadth of potential exposures, an alternative way to strategically approach both the challenges and...

This study documents a positive, economically meaningful impact of executives' general managerial skills on shareholder value. Examining 171 sudden executive deaths over thirty years, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the general ability index corresponds to at least a 1.5...

This study documents a positive, economically meaningful impact of executives’ general managerial skills on shareholder value. Examining 171 sudden executive deaths over thirty years, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the general ability index corresponds to at least a 1.5...

There is growing public concern over the rapid growth in CEO pay relative to average worker pay (CEO pay ratio). Critics contend that high CEO pay ratios could destroy firm value by damaging employee morale and/or signal CEO rent extraction. In this paper, we use a proprietary dataset to examine...

I analyze the allocation of the power to decide on hostile takeovers between directors and shareholders. My contribution is to show who actually has power in a takeover and what factors are at work to give such power. Although directors are traditionally considered to be in charge in deciding...

Americans tend to admire powerful leaders. Powerful leaders are seen as exerting influence over their organizations and shaping outcomes around them. CEO power can be exercised across a wide spectrum of decisions, including those regarding corporate strategy, operations, acquisitions,...