We examine the relationship between the optimal incentive contract and the firm’s decision to fire a manager for poor performance. We first derive some theoretical results using a simple principal-agent model, and then examine the empirical evidence on the incidence of forced turnover among...

Previous empirical analyses of the relationship between executive compensation and firm performance are often interpreted as suggesting that this relationship is weak. Although an absolute term like "weak" is ambiguous in this context, relative terms, such as "stronger," are meaningful. We argue...

The present paper proposes to employ a major shift in the legal and institutional environment to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. We use the reform of the German stock companies act in 1884 as such a major shift and estimate the...

Several studies have recommended reliance on subordinated debt as a tool for monitoring banks by investors and for enhancing depositors’ protection. However, subordinated debenture increases the level of leverage and thus the probability of costly failure. We propose a novel financial...

The Value-at-Risk (VAR) measure is based on only the second moment of a rates of return distribution. It is an insufficient risk performance measure, since it ignores both the higher moments of the pricing distributions, like skewness and kurtosis, and all the fractional moments resulting from...

This paper shows that the forward rates process discretized by a single time step together with a separability assumption on the volatility function allows for representation by a low-dimensional Markov process. This in turn leads to e±cient pricing by for example finite differences. We then...

In this paper we examine the problem of finding investors' reservation option prices and corresponding early exercise policies of American- style options in the market with proportional transaction costs using the utility based approach proposed by Davis and Zariphopoulou (1995). We present a...

Two types of financial instruments including (overnight) compounding are studied in this note. The first one is overnight compounded instruments in the case where the settlement is delayed with respect to the end of the compounding period (floating leg of the OIS). The second is options on the...