A manager's shareholders, board of directors, and potential future employers are continually assessing his ability. A rich literature has documented that this insight has profound implications for corporate governance because assessment generates incentives (good and bad), introduces assorted...

In this paper, I develop a search-matching model which predicts that new CEOs who are better matches to the firms will stay longer, perform better, and require less initial compensation. Using comprehensive EXECUCOMP dataset merged with unique data on CEO succession plans, I find significant...

We study dynamic incentive contracts in a continuous-time agency model with productivity switching between two unobserved states, about which an investor may learn by deviating from the myopically optimal action. The optimal contract balances short-run profits from myopic actions and the...

The topic of executive compensation elicits strong emotions among corporate stakeholders and practitioners. On the one hand are those who believe that chief executive officers in the United States are overpaid. On the other hand are those who believe that CEOs are simply paid the going...

Corporate governance is a multidimensional construct, with many interactive mechanisms that must be simultaneously managed for efficiency. We develop a model where multiple governance mechanisms (board independence, board expertise, and CEO equity incentives) are endogenously selected to...

We derive a measure that captures the extent to which common ownership shifts managers' incentives to internalize externalities. A key feature of the measure is that it allows for the possibility that not all investors are attentive to whether a manager's actions benefit the investor's overall...

I study the implications of economic shocks for objective and subjective CEO performance evaluation. I explore objective CEO performance evaluation using the sensitivity of CEO cash pay to earnings. To set this sensitivity, pay-setting parties draw on information about earnings, which is...

This paper studies how directors' reputational concerns affect board structure, corporate governance, and firm value. In our setting, directors affect their firms' governance, and governance, in turn, affects firms' demand for new directors. Whether the labor market rewards a...

The level of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay responds asymmetrically to good and bad news about the CEO's ability. The average CEO captures approximately half of the surpluses from good news, implying CEOs and shareholders have roughly equal bargaining power. In contrast, the average CEO bears...

This paper studies how the generality of managerial skills affects firms' governance decisions. As managerial skills become less firm-specific and more portable across firms, the market for talent offers better opportunities for replacing an incumbent chief executive officer (CEO) with an...