We analyze the optimal contract between a risk-averse manager and the initial shareholders in a two-period model where the manager's investment effort, carried out in period 1, and her current effort, carried out in period 2, both impact the second-period profit, so that it may be difficult to...

It is widely believed that executives value stock options at considerably less than market or Black-Scholes-Merton values. This belief is contingent, however, on a subtle assumption that executives are like price-taking shareholders. We argue that executives not only have ability to influence...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1993-2009, we provide evidence that the sensitivity of a chief financial officer's (CFO) option portfolio value to stock price is significantly and positively related to the firm's future stock price crash risk. In contrast, we find only weak...

The objective of CEO compensation is to better align CEO-shareholder interests by inducing CEOs to make more optimal (albeit risky) investment decisions. However, recent research suggests that these incentives have a significant down-side(i.e., they motivate executives to manipulate reported...

We analyze 228 executive compensation contracts voluntarily disclosed by Chinese listed firms and find that central-government-controlled companies disclose more information in executive compensation contracts than local-government-controlled and non-government-controlled companies. Cash-based...

We analyze the efficiency of indexing executive pay by calibrating the standard model of executive compensation to a large sample of US CEOs. The main finding is that benefits from indexing stock options are small and that fully indexing them would increase compensation costs by more than 50%...

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...

Previous literature documents that executives tend to cash out equity incentives when equity-linked compensation vests. Such a behavior destroys long-term incentives and hence is costly to outside shareholders. It is recommended that the unloading of incentives can be limited when the firm...

Following Oyer (2004) and Rajgopal, Shevlin and Zamora (2006), we provide evidence that the level of stock option compensation results from outside opportunities in the managerial labor market for a sample of 3,214 CEO-year observations from S&P1500 companies between 1996 and 2010. We argue that...