We develop a cost-benefit tradeoff model to explain corporate boards' decision whether to use compensation peer benchmarking. Peer benchmarking helps a board retain a talented but risk-averse CEO, but it weakens CEO incentives to exert effort. Consistent with high retention needs, benchmarking...

This paper analyzes the effects of the Insider Trading Sanctions Act of 1984, the first federal level insider trading statute since 1934 which substantially increased the penalties of illegal insider trading. I find that, around the passage of the Act on July 25, 1984, there were positive...

The 2008 financial crisis has led to the breakdown of the new synthesis consensus in the mainstream economic theories. Rational expectations (RE) and non-rational expectations (NRE) have respectively explained the policy irrelevance of and the behavior departure from standard economic theories....

We study a very general contest game in which players exert efforts in multiple battles. The conflict structure, which represents who participates in which battlefield, is arbitrary and can be represented by a hypergraph. We show, under mild conditions on the cost function and contest...

After the SEC mandates the disclosure of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs)' compensation in 2006, CFO pay increases significantly relative to CEO pay, particularly in firms most affected by the mandate. CFOs (but not CEOs) are more likely to leave their firms following poor performance. Earnings...

We use a multitude of tax reforms across OECD countries as natural experiments to estimate the market value of the tax benefits of debt financing. We report time-series evidence that tax reforms are followed by large changes in the value of corporate equity. However, the impact of tax reforms is...

We document a significantly negative correlation between the absolute sensitivity of the CEO's option portfolio value to dividend yield (denoted by the Greek letter Psi) and corporate dividend payouts. After the implementation of the FAS 123R, firms that reduce the CEOs' holdings of highly...

Corporate donations to charities affiliated with the board's independent directors (affiliated donations) are large and mostly undetected due to lack of formal disclosure. Affiliated donations may impair independent directors' monitoring incentives. CEO compensation is on average 9.4% higher at...

The use of equity incentives is significantly greater in countries with stronger insider trading restrictions, and these higher incentives are associated with higher total pay. These findings are robust to alternative definitions of insider trading restrictions and enforcement, and to panel...