We hand collect a database that includes a direct measure of the incoming CEO's in-house experience at the time of succession. In contrast to previous studies that rely on an insider-outsider binary variable, our continuous variable allows us to examine compensation incentives following CEO...

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Holding the cost of the option grant to the firm...

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...

Prevailing executive pay practices rest on fallacious assumptions about performance attribution, the nature of alignment, and the psychology of incentives, and have numerous unintended consequences that are value-destructive particularly for long term and diversified shareholders. The focus of...

Extensive discussions of the inefficiencies of "short-termism" in executive compensation notwithstanding, very little is known empirically about the extent of such short-termism. This paper develops a novel measure of executive pay duration that reflects the vesting periods of different pay...

Purpose: This study explores the probability of expropriation of minority shareholders by controlling shareholders in the form of CEO compensation under an imperfect governance institution by using a novel Chinese dataset over 2001-2010.Design/methodology/approach: We use a direct method to...

We address two apparent paradoxes of risk management: (1) managers hedge in order to avoid negative earnings surprises, yet they tend to hedge risks uninformative of the value of the company; and (2) the presence of options in managers' compensation distorts their incentive to hedge, inducing...

Macroeconomic fluctuations such as interest rate and exchange rate can be considered sources of good or bad “luck” for corporate performance. Incentive effects of performance-based compensation for management may be weakened or biased by macroeconomic influences depending on the ability of...

Bank executives' compensation has been widely identified as a culprit in the Global Financial Crisis, and reform of banker pay is high on the public policy agenda. While Congress targeted its reforms primarily at bankers' equity-based pay incentives, empirical research fails to show any...

Using a sample of 4,278 listed UK firms, we construct a social network of directorship-interlocks that comprises 31,495 directors. We use social capital theory and techniques developed in social network analysis to measure a director's connectedness and investigate whether this connectedness is...