The tournament model has the feature that executive compensation depends on the wages paid to workers at lower levels of the corporate hierarchy. The agency model shows that compensation based on firm performance is a means by which incentives can be provided to executives once a promotion...

Although many companies in the UK adopted an incentive plan for their directors in response to the Cadbury recommendation, few studies have examined the effect of these incentive programmes on firm performance. We investigate whether companies with these incentive plans achieve better...

This paper provides new UK evidence on the relationship between managerialincentives and firm risk using a hand-collected database of 3307 executive yearobservations (698 CEO years and 2609 other executive years). We find that therelation between pay performance sensitivity and firm risk...

This paper examines the effect of using different option valuation models to calculatethe fair market value of Executive Stock Options (ESOs) granted to executivedirectors of UK firms. Our key objective is to demonstrate empirically that somecompanies will have greater incentive and benefit from...

We value UK executive stock options (ESOs) as American options that areawarded conditional on the probability of the holders achieving some performancecriteria. Unlike the standard Black and Scholes (BS) model, which is universally usedboth in the literature and practice, this provides a more...

We find that companies dramatically raise their incumbent executives’ pay, especially equity-based pay, after losing executives to other firms. The pay raise is larger when incumbent executives have greater employment mobility in the labor market, when companies lose senior executives, and...

We analyze a hand-collected dataset of 1669 executive compensation packages at 34 firms included in the main German stock market index (DAX) for the years 2006- 2014 in order to investigate the impact of the 2009 say on pay legislation. First, we observe that the compensation packages of...

This paper examines the reliability of option fair value estimates in the presence of transaction costs. The Black Scholes Merton (BSM) framework assumes zero transaction costs and thus might not provide a reasonable approximation in this context. We investigate the model adjustments companies...

This paper explores the relationship between disclosing corporate targets and value creation. Our empirical results show the value relevance of voluntarily disclosing a low number of targets, whereas there is a clear additional positive effect of disclosing exactly one corporate target in the...

We analyze a hand-collected dataset of 1682 executive compensation packages at 34 firms included in the main German stock market index (DAX) for the years 2009-2017 in order to investigate the impact of the 2009 say on pay legislation. The findings provide important insights beyond the German...