CEO activism refers to corporate leaders taking a public stand on issues such as race relations, gender equality or climate change not directly related to their business. In this paper, we investigate under what conditions CEO activism can create firm value. We develop a model where consumers...

We analyze the effects of CEOs' layoff risk on their risk choice while overseeing a firm. A CEO, whose managerial ability is unknown, is fired if her expected ability is below average. Her risk choice changes the informativeness of output and market's belief about her ability. She can decrease...

We examine a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of private information. In our model, a manager of a firm who may learn multiple signals over time interacts with a competitive capital market and maximizes payoffs that increase in both period prices. We show (perhaps...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (2008) to detect whether the widely used class of Residual Income based...

Many challenges face the strategic leader who must deal with both the need for continuity and the need for change. Strategic leadership sets the directions, meaning, purposes, and goals of the organization. A long-term perspective is required along with many other competencies. Examples are...

CEO compensation is increasingly being linked to ESG outcomes. In this paper, we provide evidence that ESG targets in CEO pay reflect stakeholder welfare. Using granular information on contract design from Swedish firms, we show that ESG-linked contracts are more likely for CEOs with broader...

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (2008) to detect whether the widely used class of Residual Income based...