Contrary to the entrenchment view of executive compensation, I find that CEOs with more control over the firm, proxied by higher equity ownership, have smaller compensation packages and are less likely to have severance contracts. Despite lower pay, these CEOs have longer tenure and their...

We examine the determinants and outcomes of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) accepting a $1 salary, a compensation practice that occurs relatively frequently in high-profile firms and is debated by regulators, investors, and the media. Using a hand-collected sample of 93 CEOs from 91 firms...

We provide evidence concerning the effect of managerial risk-taking incentives on merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions and outcomes for different types of mergers: vertical, horizontal, and diversifying. Using chief executive officer (CEO) relative inside leverage to proxy for the incentives...

We examine how an increase in stock option grants affects CEO risk-taking. The overall net effect of option grants is theoretically ambiguous for risk-averse CEOs. To overcome the endogeneity of option grants, we exploit institutional features of multi- year compensation plans, which generate...

We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk...

Motivated by the dual agency environment in founding family firms, we examine how family firms provide compensation incentives to nonfamily executives. Nonfamily executives receive weaker risk-taking incentives and pay-for-performance incentives when family ownership is high and when family...

We examine the determinants and outcomes of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) accepting a $1 salary, a compensation practice that occurs relatively frequently in high-profile firms and is debated by regulators, investors, and the media. Using a hand-collected sample of 93 CEOs from 91 firms...

This study examines whether and how CEO equity incentives relate to financing choices (i.e., debt and leases). Using manually collected CEO compensation and lease data for a sample of large UK firms, we found evidence of a negative relationship between CEO equity incentives and firm leverage. We...

We examine how CEO compensation is affected by the presence of busy and overlap directors. We find that CEOs at firms with more busy directors receive greater total pay, fixed-salary and equity-linked pay and exhibit higher pay-performance (delta) and pay-risk (vega) sensitivities. Our results...

For 174 large Japanese corporations during 1992-1996, we find that top executive pay is higher in firms with weaker corporate governance mechanisms, controlling for standard economic determinants of pay. We use management ownership and family control (“the ownership mechanisms”), and...