This paper investigates the effect of superstar CEOs on their competitors. Exploiting shocks to CEO status due to prestigious media awards, we document a significant positive stock market performance of competitors of superstar CEOs subsequent to the award. The effect is more pronounced for...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of the target chief executive officer’s (CEO) postmerger position on the purchase premium and target shareholders’ abnormal returns around the announcement of the deal in a sample of bank mergers during the period 1990–2004. We find evidence that the...

We investigate the relationship between the slope of the wage-tenure profile and the level of monitoring across two cross sections of matched employer-employee British data. Our theoretical model predicts that increased monitoring leads to a decline in the slope of the wage-tenure profile. Our...

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...

Although stock options are commonly observed in chief executive o±cer (CEO) compensation contracts, there is theoretical controversy about whether stock options are part of the optimal contract. Using a sample of Fortune 500 companies, we solve an agency model calibrated to the company-specific...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Using Norwegian establishment surveys from 1997 and 2003, we show that performance-related pay is more prevalent in firms where workers of the main occupation have a high degree of autonomy in how to organize their work. This observation supports an interpretation of incentive pay as motivated...

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...