A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

Using a sample of 3,688 mergers and acquisitions over the period of 1992 to 2005, we find that post-merger equity risk declines roughly 18% in the year after the announcement. We find that post-merger equity risk is negatively related to the sensitivity of CEO wealth to stock return volatility...

The, often observed, positive correlation between incentive intensity and risk has been explained in two ways: the presence of transaction costs as determinants of contracts and the sorting of risk-tolerant individuals into firms using high-intensity incentive contracts. The empirical importance...