We experimentally examine how employees' employment horizons (long or short) and the performance measures in their incentive contracts (forward-looking or contemporaneous) affect employee effort allocation and performance. Consistent with economic theory, we find that the decision-influencing...

We find that fixed effects related to the location of a firm's headquarters explain variation in broad based option grants after controlling for industry effects and firm characteristics traditionally known to affect option granting. Location matters because of local labor market conditions and...

We extend Fisher, Peffer, and Sprinkle (2003) to investigate the effectiveness of a budget-based incentive contract to settings with alternate task characteristics. We first replicate their finding: when groups perform a task with an additive production function, a budget-based contract leads to...

Research in budgeting suggests that subordinates may exhibit economically significant degrees of honesty, in spite of pecuniary incentives to do otherwise. This study continues the exploration of honesty in budgeting along two dimensions. First, unlike prior experiments, we measure the...

When performance measures are used for evaluation purposes, agents have some incentives to learn how their actions affect these measures. We show that the use of imperfect performance measures can cause an agent to devote too many resources (too much effort) to acquiring information. Doing so...

This paper describes conditions under which both conventional costing and linear activity-based costing can yield poor approximations to actual expenditures. We use a simulation approach based on data from a field experiment in a hospital to estimate how the introduction of a new anesthetic...

This paper provides new evidence on whether and how boards solve costly ex post settling up to recover CEO cash compensation for unrealized gains that fail to materialize. Our analyses are motivated by the likely expanding role for ex post settling up as the risk of compensating executives for...

This study empirically examines two basic questions. First, where and why do firms make greater or lesser use of subjectivity in the performance evaluations that lead to annual bonuses? Second, what are the effects of greater or lesser use of subjectivity on employee pay satisfaction? We examine...

The paper examines the determinants and performance consequences of equity grants to senior-level executives, lower-level managers, and non-exempt employees of "new economy" firms. We find that many of the equity grant determinants and their relative importance vary significantly between new and...

Using car dealership data, we examine the relevance of forward-looking (FL) and contemporaneous (CO) measures for pay-for-performance incentives (bonus, annual raise, promotions) for long-horizon employees. Economic models suggest that while contracts with FL performance measures mitigates the...