This article presents a systematic review of the theoretical and empirical literature on option grants and managerial risk taking. One of the objectives is the motivation of further research on the topic. Risk-averse managers hold less diversified portfolios and, thus, tend to take less risk...

We survey the theoretical literature on careers in organizations, focusing on models that address detailed evidence or stylized facts. We begin with what we call building-block models: human-capital acquisition, job assignment, incentive contracting, efficiency wages, and tournaments. We then...

This paper examines the effects of board affiliation on the corporate pay gap. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2005 to 2011, we find that boards with a greater presence of directors appointed by block shareholders have lower pay gaps. Furthermore, the governance effects of board...

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal–agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. We show that they are an important feature in today's CEO labour market in...

The questions of whether there ever existed excessive risk-taking incentives from executive compensation in the financial industry, and whether top executives of financial services firms actually responded to such excessive incentives that eventually led to the crisis remain unanswered. The...

In experimental games, task-related incentives are payments to experimental subjects that vary according to their strategy choices and the consequent outcomes of the games. Limited evidence exists regarding incentive magnitude effects in experimental games. We examined one-off strategy choices...

This paper focuses on the effect of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on top managers’ compensation in Chinese public firms. Overall, we find no evidence of an RPE effect or any asymmetry in firms’ use of RPE. The results obtained using Albuquerque’s (2009) method are similar to those...