We reexamine the issue of executive compensation within a general equilibrium production context. Intertemporal optimality places strong restrictions on the form of a representative manager's compensation contract, restrictions that appear to be incompatible with the fact that the bulk of many...

We use compensation data for a sample of 701 US public firms and document a significant positive relation between the level of executive compensation and the subsequent realized stock returns. In present value terms, shareholders in firms incurring a total compensation cost of $78 million above...