We study the effects of competitive preferences, where Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) compare their wage to the wage of other CEOs within the same industry, and derive utility from being ahead of them. We show that such social concerns work in the direction of CEO wages being positively...

The role of certifiers is to test products for quality, and to communicate the test results to the market. We construct a free-entry model of certification, where each certifier chooses a test standard and a price for certification. In equilibrium, certifiers differentiate their test standards,...

I consider two seemingly unrelated puzzles. 1.Why is relative performance evaluation (RPE) used less in CEO compensation than agency theory suggests? 2.Why is sometimes, e.g., for fund managers, a 'modest' performance more highly rewarded than 'very high' performances? I consider a simple...

If entrepreneurs are liquidity constrained and not able to borrow to operate on an efficient scale, economic theory predicts that entrepreneurs with more personal wealth should do better than those with less wealth. We test this hypothesis using a novel dataset covering a large panel of...

To enforce insider trading laws, financial regulators require top executives in listed companies to make their own-company trades public. One implication of this regulatory focus is that executives below the top fly under the radar. We use register data from Norway to examine whether executives...

Existing research has found negative short-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health problems, but longer-term effects have been less documented. Using newly released register data on all general practitioner consultations in Norway through 2020 (about 14 million consultations...

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the portfolio selection of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market...