A worker's utility may increase with his income, but envy can make his utility decline with his employer's income. This article uses a principal-agent model to study profit-maximizing contracts when a worker envies his employer. Envy tightens the worker's participation constraint and so calls...

A worker's utility may increase with his own income, but envy can make his utility decline with his employer's income. Such behavior may call for high-powered incentives, so that increased effort by the worker little increases the income of his employer. This paper uses a principal-agent model...

A worker's utility may increase in his own income, but envy can make his utility decline with his employer's income. Such behavior may call for high-powered incentives, so that increased effort by the worker little increases the income of his employer. This paper employs a principal-agent model...

Optimally reallocating human capital to tasks is key for an organization to successfully navigate a transition. We study how to design employment contracts to allocate employees to different valuable projects within an organization given two simultaneous challenges: The employees have private...

It may be surprising that one of the most popular compensation schemes in business is so open to being hacked - to having managers cheat to win. We explore tournament theory to detail its vulnerabilities to various forms of cheating unilateral and multilateral. We identify who is most likely to...

We use a proprietary data set with detailed executive compensation information to examine the relationship between the incentives of the tax director and GAAP and cash effective tax rates, the book-tax gap, and measures of tax aggressiveness. We find that the incentive compensation of the tax...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

Performance-based pay is an important instrument to align the interests of managers with the interests of shareholders. However, recent evidence suggests that high-powered incentives also provide managers with incentives to manipulate the firm's reported earnings. The previous literature has...

Panel OLS and GMM-IV estimates indicate that executives respond to the adoption of a compensation clawback provision by decreasing firm risk. The mechanisms that transmit incentives to decisions and decisions to risk appear to be more conservative investment and financial policies and preemptive...

We document that CEO cash compensation is twice as sensitive to negative stock returns as it is to positive stock returns. Since stock returns include both unrealized gains and unrealized losses, we expect cash compensation to be less sensitive to stock returns when returns contain unrealized...