This work contributes to the literature demonstrating an important role for psychological traits in labor market decisions. We show that West German workers with an internal locus of control sort into jobs with performance appraisals. Appraisals provide workers who believe they control their...

This work contributes to the literature demonstrating an important role for psychological traits in labor market decisions. We show that West German workers with an internal locus of control sort into jobs with performance appraisals. Appraisals provide workers who believe they control their...

We propose a new theory of suboptimal risk-taking based on contractual externalities. We examine an industry with a continuum of firms. Each firm's manager exerts costly hidden effort. The productivity of effort is subject to systematic shocks. Firms' stock prices reflect their performance...

This paper considers an agency model in which the principal is privately informed of her production technology. In our model, the principal can require the agent to adopt the principal’s technology for production, or alternatively, to adopt a technology in the market. Information about the...

I study a continuous-time principal-agent model in which a multitasking agent engages in unobserved risk-taking. Risk-taking creates short-term profits but also increases the chance of large losses. The optimal contract incentivizes excessive risk-taking when the agent has insufficient skin in...

We study the ability of a manager, who seeks outside financing for a new project, to disclose private information about the project's risk. We assume the manager and the outside investor that offers the best financing terms may have heterogeneous and privately known risk preferences...

We find a significant hump-shaped relation between firm valuation and CEO ownership when external governance (EG) is weak, but the relation is insignificant when EG is strong. These interactive effects are identified while controlling for firm-fixed effects. The results imply that CEO ownership...

This paper derives continuous-time conditions for a manager compensated with a call option to increase risk-taking. We show that the principles proposed by Ross (2004) in a one-period environment remain valid in continuous time

We study an optimal contracting problem between shareholders and managers when managers' effort choices are hidden but on which stock market prices reveal some information. When the stock market rewards winners and punishes losers within an industry, stock-based incentive generates a tournament...

This article develops a new rationale for the emergence of pay-for-performance contracts where the labor market is competitive, workers are risk averse, and firms are risk neutral and unaware of workers' productivities. The article shows that the prevalence of pay for performance rises and the...