This study compares CEO employment contracts across two common law countries: the United States and Australia. Although the regulatory regimes of these jurisdictions enjoy many comparable features, there are also some important institutional differences in terms of capital market, tax, and...

For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

How do we prevent financial institutions from taking excessive risk when the public fisc serves as their ultimate creditor? This is one of the central questions left over after the recent financial crisis and, for the past five years, there has been no shortage of proposed answers. Two of the...

In this study, I summarize the current state of executive compensation, discuss measurement and incentive issues, document recent trends in executive pay in both U.S. and international firms, and analyze the evolution of executive pay over the past century. Most recent analyses of executive...

Clawbacks are contractual provisions in executive compensation contracts that allow for an ex post recoupment of variable pay if certain triggering conditions are met. As a result of regulatory responses to financial crises and corporate scandals as well as of growing shareholder pressure to...

Executive pay packages are increasingly subject to the criticism that they do not maximize shareholder wealth. Critics have sought a more active role for shareholders in determining compensation levels of executives at public companies. One manifestation of this movement is the recent...

Golden parachutes (“GPs”) are now standard contract provisions for public company CEOs. While they have become ubiquitous, they have also been severely criticized for harming shareholder value. As a result, GPs have been subjected to intense shareholder activism and uniquely penalized under...

We investigate say-on-pay (SOP) voting outcomes in a country (Italy) where ownership structure is concentrated by regressing shareholder dissent on a comprehensive set of independent variables (spanning from remuneration structure and disclosure to corporate governance), coming from the Italian...

Institutional investors are often criticized for their insufficient "engagement" with listed companies. Actually, information and other transaction costs limit their capacity to actively monitor investee firms, and to engage with their management. A partial solution is offered by Proxy Advisors...