We document the propensity of Standard & Poor's 500 index companies to just meet, rather than overshoot or just miss, performance targets in CEOs' annual incentive plans to boost cash bonuses. The statistical anomaly occurs only in the 4th quarter and is robust to alternative assumptions of...

This study examines the causes and consequences of incentive pay adoption among Chinese manufacturing firms. First, we find that a higher degree of labor scarcity encourages firms to adopt more incentive pay. Second, using an instrumental variables approach, we find that a 10 percentage point...

We measure the response of physicians to monetary incentives using matched administrative and time-use data on specialists from Québec (Canada). These physicians were paid fee-for-service contracts and supplied a number of different services. Our sample covers a period during which the Québec...

This study investigates whether the inconsistent findings on the implementation of relative performance evaluation (RPE) can be explained by CEOs' control over their pay process and by the interaction of RPE with pay-for-luck. Using a sample of CEO bonus compensation awards from 1992 to 2008, we...

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...

In response to recent requests from academics and practitioners, this note addresses the data and program we use in our published articles on executive compensation and incentives. First, we detail our methodology for the calculation of delta (pay-performance sensitivity), vega (risk-taking...

We study the pay of UK universities chief executives ("vice-chancellors") over a ten year period. Although there is a correlation between pay and performance, with better performing institutions paying higher salaries, we find limited evidence that this relationship is causal; that is, we find...

The litmus test for an effective compensation program is whether it provides “pay for performance.” While the concept of pay for performance is simple, its implementation is not. In particular, boards must consider not only whether a compensation plan encourages executives to pursue...

The rationale of RPE use in executive pay is to filter out common risk, not firm idiosyncratic risk. As common risk is often interpreted casually as non-diversifiable and firms’ idiosyncratic risks as totally independent of one another, we show that these casual interpretations contain three...

This paper addresses the question of how the principal's surplus and agency costs depend on the agent's wealth. Our main results are: If the agent has an additively separable utility function in income and effort and his degree of absolute prudence is smaller than three times the agent's degree...