We describe long-run trends in the distribution of charitable contributions in the United States. Over the past several decades, those who donate the most in any given year have made a rising share of all contributions. These households are also more likely to be married, older, and to have...

Proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVARs)identify structural shocks in vector autoregressions (VARs) with external proxy variables that are correlated with the structural shocks of interest but uncorrelated with other structural shocks. We provide asymptotic theory for proxy SVARs when the...

We document three new facts about gender differences in executive compensation. First, female executives receive a lower share of incentive pay in total compensation relative to males. This difference accounts for 93 percent of the gender gap in total pay. Second, the compensation of female...

We show theoretically and empirically that executives are paid less for their own firm's performance and more for their rivals' performance if an industry's firms are more commonly owned by the same set of investors. Higher common ownership also leads to higher unconditional total pay. We...

This testimony makes three main points. First, income volatility, especially when it involves income declines, imposes significant hardships on American families. It heightens stress about finances and may increase household living expenses. These hardships are most pronounced for middle-and...

In March 2010, Japanese regulators implemented the country's first legislation concerning the disclosure of director compensation for named individuals. Using the first publicly available data for Japanese executives, we document direct evidence on the level, structure, and mechanisms of CEO...

This paper identifies globalization as a factor behind the rapid increase in executive compensation and inequality over the last few decades. Employing comprehensive data on top executives at major U.S. companies, we show that compensation is higher at more global firms. We find that pay...

We explore the relationship between managerial incentives and environmental harm. We find that high-powered executive compensation packages can increase the odds of environmental law-breaking by 40-60% and the magnitude of environmental harm by over 100%. We document similar results for the...

We present a mechanism based on managerial incentives through which common ownershipaffects product market outcomes. Firm-level variation in common ownership causes varia-tion in managerial incentives and productivity across firms, which leads to intra-industryand intra-firm cross-market...