Research suggests that restricted labor mobility discourages managers from investing in human capital and reduces firm value. However, whether firms re-incentivize managers to mitigate its adverse effects remains unexplored. We find that after the adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine...

Building on recent theory, we find strong and robust evidence that external labor market incentives motivate CEOs to adopt more aggressive tax policies in order to improve firm performance and their own labor market value. In addition, we find that the tax aggressiveness-labor market incentives...

This paper examines the consequences of the increased use of performance vesting provisions in long-term incentive compensation for CEOs and other executives in the post-2006 period following FAS 123R. We re-examine the agency prediction that incentives provided by accounting or other...

This paper investigates the effect of firms’ tournament-based incentives (TI) on leasing. Measuring TI as the pay gap between the chief executive officer (CEO) and non-CEO executives, we find that firms with higher TI have a higher propensity to lease than purchase assets. Cross-sectional...

We examine whether stock option and restricted stock grants motivate higher performance using employee-level data from Google. Employees who received more equity grants than peers hired at the same time and job grade perform slightly better in the future across a variety of measures. To attempt...

Equity pay has been the primary component of managerial compensation packages at US public firms since the early 1990s. Using a comprehensive sample of top executives from 1992-2020, we estimate to what extent they trade firm equity held in their portfolios to sterilize increments in ownership...

We show that long-term compensation is associated with higher pay in the financial industry and the legal sector. Then, using a detailed survey of law school graduates, we explore why firms use long-term compensation. We find that individuals with jobs that make them highly visible and that...

Traditional finance theory suggests that riskier investments should yield higher returns. Challenging this notion, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that highly-incented managers may take on excessive risk, leading to greater losses, while other theoretical research argues that high...

A long-standing controversy is whether CEO employment contracts insulate inferior managers from discipline leading to shareholder wealth destruction, or whether contracts alleviate managerial risk aversion and encourage value-enhancing decisions. Using a unique dataset on S&P 500 CEO employment...

The hottest topic in corporate governance circles today involves company commitments to and pursuit of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives in addition to the traditional pursuit of profits. One facet of this debate has to do with how to motivate executives to pursue ESG...