Purpose: This study examines the moderating impact of corporate governance quality on the relation between CEO bonus compensation and accounting conservatism. Design/methodology/approach: We use market-based and accrual-based measures to estimate accounting conservatism. According to prior...

We document that the cross-sectional variation in CEO pay levels has declined precipitously, both at the economy level and within industry and size groups. We find evidence consistent with one explanation; reciprocal benchmarking (i.e., firms including each other in the set of peers used to...

We argue that the relationship between managerial pay-for-performance incentives and risk taking is procyclical. We study the relationship between incentives provided by stock-based compensation and firm risk for U.S. non-financial corporations over the two business cycles between 1992 and 2009....

This study considers the implications of excessive non-salary-based executive pay on capital structure during the years 2005 through 2007, directly preceding the 2008 stock market crash. The hypothesis proposes that for firms in the financial sector, executives awarded generous compensation...

This paper investigates the usefulness of relative performance evaluation (RPE) for the incentive scheme in an undeveloped economy lacking market-based competition. In a sample of China's listed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) during 2001-2005, 41% of the Chairmen of the Board or CEOs who left...

How do we prevent financial institutions from taking excessive risk when the public fisc serves as their ultimate creditor? This is one of the central questions left over after the recent financial crisis and, for the past five years, there has been no shortage of proposed answers. Two of the...

In a stylized model of a financial intermediary, risk managers expend costly effort to reduce loan PD and LGD. When effort is unobservable, incentive compensation (IC) can induce manager effort, but underwriting and loss mitigation managers require different IC contracts. Subsidized insured...

We examine whether the relationship between managerial risk-taking incentives and bank risk is sensitive to the underlying macroeconomic conditions. We find that risk-taking incentives provided to bank executives are associated with higher bank riskiness during economic downturns. We attribute...

We explore the effect of institutional directors on Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay (total, fixed, and variable compensation). We delve particularly into the impact of pressure-sensitive and pressure-resistant institutional directors, who, respectively, represent institutional investors who...

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is, at least on paper, enjoying widespread popularity in determining the level of executive compensation. Yet existing empirical evidence of RPE is decidedly mixed. Two principal explanations are held responsible for this discord. A constructional challenge...