Renewable fixed-term contracts are widespread in executive compensation. This paper shows why these contracts are optimal and how they affect managers' and boards' behavior. When managers' match-quality changes over time, offering severance pay for premature dismissal can discourage window...

Our paper evaluates recent regulatory proposals mandating the deferral of bonus payments and claw-back clauses in the financial sector. We study a broadly applicable principal agent setting, in which the agent exerts effort for an immediately observable task (acquisition) and a task for which...

We study non-contractible intangible investment in a dynamic agency model with multitasking. The manager's short-term task determines current performance which deteriorates with investment in the firm's future profitability, his long-term task. The optimal contract dynamically balances...

This paper provides a complete characterization of optimal contracts in principal-agent settings where the agent's action has persistent effects. We model general information environments via the stochastic process of the likelihood-ratio. The martingale property of this performance metric...