Influenced by their compensation plans, CEOs make their own luck through decisions that affect future firm risk. After adopting a relative performance evaluation (RPE) plan, total and idiosyncratic risk are higher, and the correlation between firm and industry performance is lower. The opposite...

This paper examines the integration of ESG performance metrics into executive compensation using a detailed panel dataset of European executives. Despite becoming more widespread, most ESG metrics are largely discretionary, carry immaterial weights in payout calculations, and contribute little...

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Among other benefits, averaging reduces...

For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

Performance-based pay is an important instrument to align the interests of managers with the interests of shareholders. However, recent evidence suggests that high-powered incentives also provide managers with incentives to manipulate the firm's reported earnings. The previous literature has...

Using data that includes specific contractual details of Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) contracts granted to executives for 1,833 firms for the period 1998 to 2012, we develop new methods to characterize RPE awards and measure their value and incentive properties. The frequency in the use...

We show in a theoretical model that credit default swaps induce managerial agency problems through two channels: reducing the opportunity for managers to transfer value to equityholders from creditors via strategic default, and reducing the intensity of monitoring by creditors, which leads to...

Using a regulation that increased portfolio disclosure frequency of US mutual funds as an exogenous shock shortening funds’ investment horizon, we find that affected funds influence portfolio firms to reduce the pay duration of their executives to incentivize them to also have shorter...

This paper focuses on the effect of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on top managers’ compensation in Chinese public firms. Overall, we find no evidence of an RPE effect or any asymmetry in firms’ use of RPE. The results obtained using Albuquerque’s (2009) method are similar to those...

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Holding the cost of the option grant to the firm...