This paper presents a real-options model of entrenchment in which a CEO chooses how much effort to put into boosting a firm's productivity and the board and CEO bargain over executive-compensation and investment policies. The surplus that bargaining allocates derives from the reduction in value...

This paper presents a model of a firm that backdates the granting of executive stock options in order to maximize actual compensation for a given level of reported compensation. The model is used to estimate the magnitude of the difference between the actual and reported values of option grants....

This note describes how meaningful measures of executive compensation can be extracted from the proxy statements that firms send to shareholders each year. It shows where the information needed to calculate such measures can be found and why the most informative measures of executive pay differ...

This paper presents a new model of CEO turnover that includes outside employment and retirement options. The board and the CEO use firm performance to update their beliefs about the CEO's ability. If the CEO's perceived ability falls below an endogenously determined threshold, the board fires...