Business income is important in the upper tail of the personal income distribution, but the extent to which it is captured by measures of personal income varies substantially across tax regimes. Using linked individual and firm data from Norway, we are able to attribute business income to...

We estimate the effects of a mandate allocating a third of corporate board seats to workers (shared governance). We study a reform in Germany that abruptly abolished this mandate for new firm cohorts but locked it in for incumbents. Rejecting the canonical hold-up prediction - that increasing...

During both the 2008 and the COVID crises, aggregate employment in Europe and the US fell despite continuing growth in the aggregate capital stock. Using more than one million firm-year observations of small and medium European firms between 2003 and 2018, this paper introduces new stylized...

An underlying assumption in the executive compensation literature is that there is a national labor market for CEOs. The urban economics literature, however, documents higher ability among workers in large metropolitans, which results in a real and stable urban wage premium. In this paper, we...

Stock option grants to top managers have largely contributed to the dramatic increase in US executive pay in recent years. In this paper it is argued that stock options, compared to other forms of compensation, have created strong incentives for managers to engage in lobbyingactivities for...

We analyze the relation between CEO compensation and networks of executive and non-executive directors for all listed UK companies over the period 1996-2007. We examine whether networks are built for reasons of information gathering or for the accumulation of managerial influence. Both indirect...

The primary role of equity compensation is to provide incentives to an effort-averse agent. Here, we show that the chosen level of equity incentives, when publicly disclosed, will also convey information about future earnings, causing two-way linkages between incentive compensation and financial...

An underlying assumption in the executive compensation literature is that there is a national labor market for CEOs. The urban economics literature, however, documents higher ability among workers in large metropolitians, which results in a real and stable urban wage premium. In this paper, we...

Based on a variety of theoretical motivations, this paper first examines empirically whether geography affects CEO compensation and finds that it does. Specifically, if the CEOs of firms that are geographically-close to CEO i's firm experience a 1% increase in salary in a given year, CEO i will...

CEO remuneration is contentious and so we applaud Jacquart and Armstrong's (2013) systematic evidence-based review. We augment their analysis in two ways. First, we highlight the lack of demonstrated validity of “unaided expert judgment” to set CEO remuneration by pointing out that the...