For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

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...

Using data that includes specific contractual details of Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) contracts granted to executives for 1,833 firms for the period 1998 to 2012, we develop new methods to characterize RPE awards and measure their value and incentive properties. The frequency in the use...

We show in a theoretical model that credit default swaps induce managerial agency problems through two channels: reducing the opportunity for managers to transfer value to equityholders from creditors via strategic default, and reducing the intensity of monitoring by creditors, which leads to...

This paper surveys the recent literature on CEO compensation. The rapid rise in CEO pay over the past 30 years has sparked an intense debate about the nature of the pay-setting process. Many view the high level of CEO compensation as the result of powerful managers setting their own pay. Others...

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Among other benefits, averaging reduces...

Performance-based pay is an important instrument to align the interests of managers with the interests of shareholders. However, recent evidence suggests that high-powered incentives also provide managers with incentives to manipulate the firm's reported earnings. The previous literature has...

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...

If managers are risk-averse and compensation schemes are not directly linked to shareholder wealth, incentives to allocate effort to manage effects of relative and macroeconomic shocks may be distorted. In this paper we develop a simple model to identify factors that determine the optimal...

Using a regulation that increased portfolio disclosure frequency of US mutual funds as an exogenous shock shortening funds’ investment horizon, we find that affected funds influence portfolio firms to reduce the pay duration of their executives to incentivize them to also have shorter...