Any firm choosing a CEO faces a double problem: candidate selection and choice of a compensation scheme. We derive sufficient conditions where the unique optimal compensation scheme is a capped-bonus contract in a pure moral-hazard environment, while equity is used when the firm also faces...

Using hand-collected data on CEO appointments during shareholder activism campaigns, this study examines whether shareholder involvement in CEO recruiting affects frictions in CEO hiring decisions. The results indicate that appointments of CEOs who are recruited with shareholder activist...

This paper demonstrates that executive compensation convexity, measured as the sensitivity of managerial equity compensation portfolios to stock volatility, predicts firm-specific crashes. A bottom-to-top decile change in compensation convexity results in a 21% increase in a firm's crash risk...

We examine how ex ante financial distress risk affects CEO compensation. In order to disentangle the joint effects of performance on compensation and distress risk, we focus our analyses on new CEOs. Our results indicate financial distress risk affects compensation through two channels. First,...

We provide evidence that CEO equity incentives, especially stock options, influence stock liquidity risk via information disclosure quality. We document a negative association between CEO options and the quality of future managerial disclosure policy. Contributing to the literature on CEO...

Influenced by their compensation plans, CEOs make their own luck through decisions that affect future firm risk. After adopting a relative performance evaluation (RPE) plan, total and idiosyncratic risk are higher, and the correlation between firm and industry performance is lower. The opposite...

A rarely studied trend in corporate governance is the increasing tendency to fill CEO openings through external hires rather than through internal promotions: Kevin J. Murphy and Ján Zábojník (2004) show that the proportion of outside hires has doubled and their pay premium almost quadrupled...

This paper investigates the impact of firms’ positions in the network of intersectoral input-output linkages on the use, intensity, and implementation of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in CEO compensation contracts. Consistent with a fundamental but not thoroughly investigated...