Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that labor's interest may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based...

We empirically test whether executives' increases in base salary when promoted to CEO result from the wage bids of competing firms (i.e., "market-based tournaments") or from the strategic choices of the firm's board of directors to elicit optimal executive incentives (i.e., "classic...

Research Question/ Issue: Do large, within-firm executive pay differences hurt firm performance? Prior literature shows mixed results concerning the sign of the relationship between executive pay disparity and firm performance. This study evaluates that literature, clarifies what tournament...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...

Disability Insurance (DI) may affect workers' outcomes such as their probability to enter DI, to recover, and their employment. Supplementary insurance may increase these moral hazard effects, but also increases the financial gains of private insurers to reduce benefit costs. With increased...

We study the factors that predict medical malpractice ("med mal") insurance premia, using national data from Medical Liability Monitor over 1990 to 2017. A number of core findings are not easily explained by standard economic theory. First, we estimate long run elasticities of premia to...

Public disability insurance (DI) programs in many countries face pressure to reduce their generosity in order to remain sustainable. In this paper, we investigate the welfare effects of giving a larger role to private insurance markets in the face of public DI cuts. Exploiting a unique reform...

Many studies have investigated flood risk and insurance coverage in the 100-year flood zone, but much less is known about the periphery of the flood zone. We present a new approach to estimate flood risk and insurance take-up in the vicinity of the flood zone based on building-level inundation...

We present a theory of the demand for flood insurance and empirically analyze the effects of the adoption of Risk Rating 2.0, using individual insurance histories for all NFIP policies. The reform increased exit and reduced entry, both in the flood zone and its periphery. The reform had highly...

Microeconomic theory predicts that under certain regularity conditions higher idiosyncratic risk increases the propensity to insure against independent marketable risks. We apply these predictions to the specific case of labor income risk and car insurance using data from the UK. The main...