We provide evidence on how personal shocks that plausibly reduce a CEO's career horizon, triggered by either the CEO's diagnosis of a serious illness or an illness or death of a close relative, affect key corporate policies. We validate our identification strategy by showing that these events...

Firms provide compensation incentives to executives, primarily in the form of bonus payments, to alleviate slack in the deployment of corporate resources to working capital. Financially constrained firms are heavy users of working capital incentives. So are firms that are less exposed to...

This paper investigates the impact of family control and institutional investors on CEO pay packages in Continental Europe, using a large data set of 915 listed firms with 4,045 firm-year observations from 14 countries over the period 2001-2008. We find that family control curbs the level of CEO...

This paper investigates the impact of family control and institutional investors on CEO pay packages in Continental Europe, using a dataset of 754 listed firms with 3,731 firm-year observations from 14 countries during 2001-2008. We find that family control curbs the level of CEO total and cash...

This study tests if managerial preferences explain how firms hedge, i.e. how they choose between linear contracts and put options, and if they finance these hedging positions with cash-on-hand or by selling upside (call options). Using hand-collected data on derivative portfolios we characterize...