Shareholders activists and regulators are pressuring U.S. firms to separate the titles of CEO and Chairman of the Board. They argue that separating the titles will reduce agency costs in corporations as well as potentials benefits. Our empirical evidence provides preliminary support for the...

This paper provides the first systematic examination of policies and procedures put in place by corporations to regulate trading in the stock by the firm's own insiders. Over 90 percent of oursample companies have their own policy restricting trading by insiders, and nearly 80 percent have...

We empirically evaluate 20 prominent contributions to a broad range of areas in the empirical corporate finance literature. We assemble the necessary data and apply a single, simple econometric method, the connected-groups approach of Abowd, Karmarz, and Margolis (1999), to appraise the extent...

The usage of performance-vesting (p-v) equity awards to top executives in large U.S. companies has grown from 20 to 70 percent from 1998 to 2012. We measure the effects of p-v provisions on value, delta, and vega of equity-based compensation. We find large differences in the value of p-v awards...

We provide a detailed analysis of 4,103 compensation clawback provisions used by S&P 1,500 firms from 2000–2013. The adoption and breadth of a clawback provision are related to the scope for executive malfeasance, compensation-related reasons to misrepresent performance; and firm governance....

We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk...

Using a novel empirical approach and newly available administrative data on US tax filings, we estimate the corporate elasticity of taxable income and determine how such tax responsiveness varies depending on accounting method, firm size, and interest rate. In response to a 10 percent increase...

We empirically examine the effects of index investing using predictions derived from a Grossman-Stiglitz framework. An increase in index investing leads to lower information production as measured by Google searches, EDGAR views, and analyst reports, yet price informativeness remains unchanged....

Using data that includes specific contractual details of Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) contracts granted to executives for 1,833 firms for the period 1998 to 2012, we develop new methods to characterize RPE awards and measure their value and incentive properties. The frequency in the use...