An unprecedented number of firms announced CEO salary reductions at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which we argue was triggered by an exogenous increase in stakeholder outrage toward executive pay. We document that the overall compensation of these CEOs did not meaningfully decrease...

Research Question/Issue: Does inside debt compensation affect previous thought on compensation effects in IPOs? What explains variation in compensation when a company goes public? What is the composition of CEO compensation in an IPO? What types of compensation may be more optimal for or are...

Stakeholders are increasingly concerned with the social and environmental impacts of modern corporations. These concerns have led to directly incentivizing CEOs by making their pay contingent on ESG outcomes. In this paper, we propose to examine the implications of ESG-linked pay on the CEO...

Research Question/Issue: This paper examines whether CEOs whose writing is more difficult to read is a signal or proxy for difficulty in monitoring their activities, resulting in increased monitoring costs. If so, does this increased monitoring cost result in higher performance-pay sensitivity...

We examine the efficacy of proxy voting to limit inflated CEO pay. We find that the percentage of dissenting votes that go against director-sponsored compensation proposals increases following a staggered rejection of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (RIDD), which increases CEOs’ job...