This paper builds on Rosen (1981) and Hvide (2002) to provide a simple framework that elucidates the nature of incentives in the tournaments among top executives in both the external managerial labor market for the top executive positions in other companies and within the executives' own firm...

We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk...

We provide new evidence on the debate whether CEOs in public U.S. firms are significantly overpaid using their counterparts in private U.S. firms over the period 1999 to 2008. Using public and private firm CEO pay data made available through mandated SEC disclosures, we first show that after...