We present robust evidence that firms enlarge the executive pay gap when executive mobility is constrained by the enhanced enforceability of non-compete agreements. We interpret this finding as evidence that firms increase tournament incentives to keep executives incentivized after the loss of...

This paper builds on Rosen (1981) and Hvide (2002) to provide a simple framework that elucidates the nature of incentives in the tournaments among top executives in both the external managerial labor market for the top executive positions in other companies and within the executives' own firm...

We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk...

Using the pay gap between a firm’s CEO and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms to conceptualize the prize of winning external promotion tournaments, we document a positive relationship between external tournament incentives (ETIs) and IPO underpricing – a proxy of the cost of...

New approaches in health care, such as e.g. Integrated Delivery Systems, affect the role and tasks of medical suppliers. More and more, medical suppliers are incorporated into the process of guiding patients to medical specialists and hospitals and thus managing the course of disease. In this...

Classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to induce risk neutrality in otherwise risk averse agents. In an experiment, we find that subjects acting as executives do also take risks that are excessive from the perspective of shareholders if...

Top management faces two key organizational design choices: (1) how much authority to delegate to lower-level managers, and (2) how to design incentive compensation to ensure that these managers do not misuse their discretion. Although theoretical accounting literature has emphasized the joint...

Standard economic theory and intuition suggests that the free rider problem will overwhelm firm-wide incentives in large firms. Despite this, such schemes are relatively common in manufacturing firms and may be more popular in larger firms. This paper models an optimal incentive contract and a...

This paper compares benefits and costs related to hierarchical and decentralized organizations in an agency framework. We show that the relative efficiency of hierarchy diminishes in contexts with asymmetric information. When effort is not observable, a performance-related pay is required in...

Empirical research on the principal-agent model has focused almost exclusively on the incentives provided to chief executive officers. However, the model is also directly relevant to the incentives provided to other top executives. Furthermore, the extent to which other executives will be...