Most studies of executive compensation have data on pay, but not on total income. Studies of executives in Japan do not even have good data on pay. Although we too lack direct data on Japanese salaries, from income tax filings we compile data on total executive incomes, and from financial...

Most studies of executive compensation focus on publicly traded companies. The high levels of compensation there are often attributed to agency slack due to ownership by diffused shareholders. If so, pay at private companies more closely held should be much lower. Governments in the United...

Why do people have ambiguity aversion, preferring, a gamble with a 50% chance of success to one whose expected probability of success is 50% but where that 50% is an unbiased estimate? The answer modelled here, in the spirit of the career concerns literature, is learning: a risk-averse person...

It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This paper makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying asset becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This paper uses two new...

An independent judiciary faces the problem of how to restrain high-court judges from indulging their personal whims. One restraint is the desire of judges to influence future judges. To do so, judges may have to maintain their own or the system's legitimacy by restraining their own behavior....

Independent central bankers and judges can both be more usefully viewed as examples of trustees than as agents. A trust is alegal insitution with rules set up by a settlor, administered by a trustee on behlaf of beneficiaries. Public trustees often are motivated more by Pride, Policy, Place and...