Displaced workers, especially long tenured workers, face large human capital losses. Private firms frequently offer insurance against this threat in the form of severance pay – scheduled benefits linked in expectation to the worker’s human capital loss. We explore this linkage, first...

On theoretical grounds, monitoring of top executives by the (supervisory) board is expected to be value relevant. The empirical evidence is ambiguous and we analyze three noncompeting explanations for this ambiguity: (i) The positive effect on firm value of board monitoring is hidden in stock...

This paper develops a framework for studying individuals’ ideas about what constitutes just compensation for chief executive officers (CEOs) and reports estimates of just CEO pay and the principles guiding ideas of justice. The sample consists of students pursuing a Master of Business...

We investigate the relationship between the slope of the wage-tenure profile and the level of monitoring across two cross sections of matched employer-employee British data. Our theoretical model predicts that increased monitoring leads to a decline in the slope of the wage-tenure profile. Our...

In a contest players compete for winning a prize by effort and thereby increasing their probability of winning. Contestants, however, could also improve their own relative position by harming the other players. We experimentally analyze contests with heterogeneous agents who may individually...

La teoria dei contratti ha mostrato che `e possibile porre in essere un contratto di lavoro esecutorio che preveda il pagamento di bonus condizionati al comportamento ”leale” del lavoratore. In questo caso il pagamento di salari di ecienza non `e coerente con il comportanto ottimale...

This paper summarizes new evidence from the National Bureau of Economic Research “Shared Capitalism†Project on the extent to which workers’ earnings depend on the performance of their firm or work group in the US and advanced Europe and on the impact of sharing arrangements on...

Our paper is a further contribution to the still very small empirical literature on the effects of competition on managerial incentive schemes. Based on a theoretical model that incorporates both strategic interaction between firms and a principal agent relationship, we investigate the...

There is strong empirical evidence that firms do not always adjust their capital structure according to established capital structure theories. Rather, they follow a passive strategy such that capital structure changes are mainly driven by their stock returns. This paper investigates to what...