We study changes in the design of CEO contracts when firms transition from being public with dispersed ownership to being private with strong principals in the form of private equity sponsors. These principals redesign many, but far from all, contract features. There is no evidence that they...

Equity-based compensation causes increases in firms' share count and dilutes Earnings Per Share (EPS), which provides firms with an incentive to raise EPS using either share buybacks or earnings management. We employ a regression discontinuity framework to provide evidence of a causal link...

We examine how incentive compensation for nonfamily executives in family firms differs from incentive compensation for executives in nonfamily firms. Nonfamily executives in family firms receive significantly less performance-based pay and equity-based pay. Family monitoring, risk aversion, and...

Executive pay has become a regulatory flashpoint of the global financial crisis. In contrast to the traditional non-interventionist approach to executive compensation, it has galvanized regulators around the world to search for effective responses to the perceived problem of executive pay. These...

This paper investigates the impact of managerial compensation on the likelihood of covenant violations and reports that higher CEO risk-shifting incentives significantly increase the likelihood of covenant violations. Evidence suggests that CEOs with creditor unfriendly compensation in leveraged...

This paper investigates the role external advice plays in the board's determination of CEO compensation. We show that CEO incentive pay increases with the degree of compensation consultant independence using a quasi-natural experiment provided by the creation of an independent consultant after...

I study the effect of passive institutional ownership on CEO compensation duration by exploiting exogenous variation in passive ownership associated with Russell Index reconstitution. A one-standard-deviation increase in passive ownership leads to a 0.46-standard-deviation increase in...

We show in a theoretical model that credit default swaps induce managerial agency problems through two channels: reducing the opportunity for managers to transfer value to equityholders from creditors via strategic default, and reducing the intensity of monitoring by creditors, which leads to...

I document the richness of CEO compensation packages and show that boards learn about the desirability of the many complex package features through observing how these features are associated with firm performance. I first capture the detailed features of plan-based awards for CEOs of the...

This paper examines the impact of public scrutiny on CEO compensation using the unique opportunity provided by the 2008 financial crisis, government support, and legislated compensation restrictions. I introduce novel data on executive perks at S&P 500 firms from 2006 to 2012. Overall, my...