In the empirical estimation of the relation between CEO pay and both firm and peer performance, researchers typically include conventional accounting-based measures that reflect firm performance net of executive pay expense. We analytically show that when firms evaluate CEO performance relative...

Given a standard moral hazard problem, the agent's optimal compensation can be cast as a function of either (i) the gross outcome, or (ii) the net outcome, which is the gross outcome net of the agent's compensation. Contracts based on the net outcome are important in practice because (i)...

We study whether relative power in the CEO-CFO relationship influences CEO compensation. To operationalize relative power of a CEO over a CFO, we define CFO co-option as the appointment of a CFO after a CEO assumes office. We find that CFO co-option is associated with a CEO pay premium of about...

We examine a setting in which managers have differential career concerns and firm performance is publicly observed using disaggregated measures that are incrementally informative but costly to contract upon. In such a setting, when do firms contract on aggregated rather than disaggregated...