I provide causal empirical evidence of how changes in the bargaining power of CEOs affect CEO compensation. Using the staggered rejections of previously adopted Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by US state courts to capture an exogenous increase in CEOs’ bargaining power, I find that the...

The competitive target pay policy sets a target dollar number for total CEO compensation within a specified range of the amounts paid to a CEO’s peers chosen from similar sized firms in the same industry. If such a policy were widely adopted by compensation committees, we would observe a...

This paper investigates the effects of regulatory interventions on contracting relationships within firms by examining the impacts of the Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) Act on CEO compensation. Using panel data of the S&P 1500 firms, it quantifies welfare gains from a principal–agent model with hidden...

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Holding the cost of the option grant to the firm...

Prior literature provides compelling evidence of an asymmetric relation between executive bonus compensation and earnings performance. In particular, this literature reports that compensation committees assign greater weight to good (positive) earnings performance than poor (negative) earnings...

The hottest topic in corporate governance circles today involves company commitments to and pursuit of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives in addition to the traditional pursuit of profits. One facet of this debate has to do with how to motivate executives to pursue ESG...

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...

Stakeholders are increasingly concerned with the social and environmental impacts of modern corporations. These concerns have led to directly incentivizing CEOs by making their pay contingent on ESG outcomes. In this paper, we propose to examine the implications of ESG-linked pay on the CEO...

We examine the impact of board structure on executive pay for 1,880 UK public firms over 1983-2002, using panel data analysis. Firstly, the proportion of non-executive directors tends to decrease the rate of increase in executive pay whilst board size tends to increase it. Secondly, the...