We use a unique data set of over two million matched employer-employee-year observations in Italy over the 1994-2000 period to identify the causal effect of a quasi-exogenous shock to within-firm pay inequality on firm performance, investment, and payout policies. Consistent with our theoretical...

This paper surveys the literature that studies the connection between leverage and executive compensation. First, we discuss the dynamics of pay-for-performance compensation and how to measure it. Then we study the theoretical underpinnings of how firm leverage may be related to the compensation...

We study compensation contracts of individual portfolio managers using hand-collected data of over 4,500 U.S. mutual funds. Variations in the compensation structures are broadly consistent with an optimal contracting equilibrium. The likelihood of explicit performance-based incentives is...

This paper studies the effect of the number of cases of COVID-19 on stock returns from over 3,500 publicly listed firms headquartered across 167 regions in 10 European countries. We instrument the number of cases per million inhabitant in each region with its population, density, and the soccer...

We examine the role of peer (e.g., Lipper indices) vs. pure (i.e., market indices) benchmarks in the compensation contract of mutual fund managers. We first model the impact of peer vs. pure benchmarks on fund manager incentives. Then, using a unique hand-collected dataset, we test the...