Responding to the financial crisis of 2008, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank Act”) to “provide for financial regulatory reform” and to “protect consumers and investors[.]” Section 951 of the Dodd-Frank Act (“Section 951”)...

Clawbacks are contractual provisions in executive compensation contracts that allow for an ex post recoupment of variable pay if certain triggering conditions are met. As a result of regulatory responses to financial crises and corporate scandals as well as of growing shareholder pressure to...

It is often claimed that (i) managers work too hard on operational issues and do not spend enough effort on strategic activities and (ii) something can be done about this by introducing nonfinancial performance measures as for instance with a balanced scorecard. We give an explanation for both...

The likelihood that tripping a debt covenant would precipitate the dismissal of top management provides an implicit incentive for managers to perform that is incremental to the explicit incentives in compensation contracts. I assess the sensitivity of the CEO's cash compensation to earnings and...

While the social and economic impacts of how disclosures are presented are well-understood, it is less clear how disclosure decisions unfold throughout the annual reporting cycle. We study this issue by exploring the experience of interpreting and implementing corporate reporting rules, focusing...

This paper tests two hypotheses from the theory of elimination tournaments: (i) that uneven tournaments, where the contestants are ex ante heterogeneous, entail lower effort exertion; this is a prediction from agency theory that has not been tested empirically before; and (ii) whether incentives...

This paper considers the interplay of job assignments with the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of an agent. Job assignments influence the self confidence of the agent, and thereby his intrinsic motivation. Monetary reward allow the principal to complement intrinsic motivation with extrinsic...

An essential ingredient in models of career concerns is ex ante uncertainty about an agent's type. This paper shows how career concerns can arise even in the absence of any such ex ante uncertainty, if the unobservable actions that an agent takes influence his future productivity. By...

This paper analyzes the bahavior of a principal with bounded memory who can offer a two-period performance-based contract to an agent. In the model he can choose whether to evaluate the agent after each period or only at the end of the second period. If the agent is wealth-constrained, the...