We examine whether features of bank executives' compensation contracts cause them to take actions that contribute to systemic risk. Using multiple return-based measures of systemic risk coupled with an identification strategy that exploits heteroskedasticity to account for endogenous matching of...

Little is known about why CEOs voluntarily purchase shares of their firm other than because they expect to directly profit from doing so. However, since CEOs are risk-averse, highly un-diversified, and face litigation costs from trading on favorable private information, direct profits are...

An extensive literature examines whether senior executives’ contractual incentives influence their financial reporting decisions. However, little is known about whether— and how—the incentives of lower-level (or “rank-and-file”) employees, who are perhaps even more directly involved in...

We examine how income taxes—both managerial and corporate—influence the design of firms’ debt contracts and their use of financial covenants in particular. Both levels of taxation have the potential to exacerbate conflicts of interest among creditors, shareholders, and managers and,...

We develop three complementary tests to examine how adverse selection affects the design of executive compensation contracts: First, we show that externally hired CEOs receive higher total pay and have fewer equity incentives relative to internally promoted CEOs, consistent with their ability to...