The purpose of this article is to examine whether R&D expenditure is biased downwards because of self-serving behavior of highly incentivized managers. This offers an insight into the general relationship between incentives and opportunism. Using instrumental variables and panel data methods for...

This paper investigates whether and how Japanese firms use management earnings forecasts as a performance target for determining executive cash compensation. Consistent with the implications of the agency theory, we find that the sensitivity of executive cash compensation varies with the extent...

This paper solves the dynamic investment problem of a risk averse agent compensated with a performance related bonus plus a salary guaranteed up to a certain level of underperformance. The main contribution is to explicitly take into account the financial fragility of the principal [employer],...

Given a standard moral hazard problem, the agent's optimal compensation can be cast as a function of either (i) the gross outcome, or (ii) the net outcome, which is the gross outcome net of the agent's compensation. Contracts based on the net outcome are important in practice because (i)...

From the perspective of non-financial performance, this study investigates the effect of corporate awards on executive compensation. We find that as a measure of non-financial performance, corporate awards help increase executive compensation by demonstrating the company’s status in the...

Using a regulation that increased portfolio disclosure frequency of US mutual funds as an exogenous shock shortening funds’ investment horizon, we find that affected funds influence portfolio firms to reduce the pay duration of their executives to incentivize them to also have shorter...