"Short-termism'' of executives has recently attracted a lot of public attention. This paper develops a novel measure of CEO compensation duration and studies how it affects corporate risk taking. This measure is constructed using grant-level data of CEO compensation and reflects vesting...

In recent years firms have been shifting their executive compensation packages from plain stock and option grants to grants with accounting-based performance vesting provisions and awards that benchmark firm performance against those of a designated peer group. One potential explanation for this...

This paper extends the costly state verification model from Townsend (1979) to a dynamic and hierarchical setting with an investor, a financial intermediary, and an entrepreneur. Such a hierarchy is natural in a setting where the intermediary has special monitoring skills. This setting yields a...

At the end of January, 2006 the Iraqi government issued roughly $2.7 billion of debt in exchange for over $20 billion of Saddam-era commercial claims. This paper uses variation in the yield spread of this sovereign debt to evaluate pacification policy in Iraq. Structural change models are run in...