An important line of recent literature has found gender differences in attitudes toward competition, with men being more likely to choose competitive incentive schemes, even when factors such as ability and risk aversion are controlled for. This paper examines the effect of information on the...

According to the rent-extraction hypothesis, weak corporate governance allows entrenched CEOs to capture the pay-setting process and benefit from events outside of their controlget paid for luck. In this paper, I find that the independence requirement imposed on boards of directors by the...

This study examines the determinants of CEO compensation using data from a nationally representative sample of privately held U.S. corporations. We find that (i) the pay-size elasticity is much larger for privately held firms than for the publicly traded firms on which previous research has...

This paper surveys the recent literature on CEO compensation. The rapid rise in CEO pay over the past 30 years has sparked an intense debate about the nature of the pay-setting process. Many view the high level of CEO compensation as the result of powerful managers setting their own pay. Others...

In the UK, the top executive remuneration policy is not geared towards the creation of value but compensation revisions are rather driven by changes in corporate size, measured by sales growth. This suggests that managing larger firms requires special managerial skills. Even in UK companies with...

The product mix changes that have occurred in banking organizations during the 1990s provide a natural experiment for investigating how firms adjust their executive compensation contracts as their mix of businesses changes. Deregulation and new technology have eroded banking organizations’...

Principal-agent theory suggests that a manager should be paid relative to a benchmark that captures the effect of market or sector performance on the firm's own performance. Recently, it has been argued that we do not observe such indexation in the data because executives can set pay in their...

The relationship between CEO pay and performance has been much analyzed in the management and economics literature. This study analyzes the structure of executive compensation in family and non-family firms. In line with predictions of agency theory, it is found that the share of base salary is...

A strictly risk-averse manager makes joint decisions on a firm's tax payments and book profit declarations according to accounting standards. It is analysed how the incentives to overpay or evade taxes and to inflate book profits are influenced by (1) the composition of the manager's...

This paper reviews the history of executive compensation disclosure and other government policies affecting CEO pay, and as well surveys the literature on the effects of these policies. Disclosure has increased nearly uniformly since 1933. A number of other regulations, including special taxes...