We study the selection of peers into compensation peer groups reported by U.S. corporations. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation requires firms to report these peer groups which are used by investors and shareholders to benchmark the compensation of CEOs. Building on a novel,...

Managers play a crucial role in shaping firm performance. However, we know little about how managers perform on one of their key responsibilities: managing strategic decisions. The challenge of studying the quality of these decisions is that we often only observe the outcome associated with the...

Publicly traded firms in the U.S. typically determine C.E.O. compensation by benchmarking the pay of their C.E.O.s against the pay of C.E.O.s in “peer” firms. The naming of particular peer companies by individual firms constitutes a supra-firm relational structure (network) in which an...