We provide empirical evidence on how the practice of competitive benchmarking affects CEO pay. We find that the use of benchmarking is widespread, and has a significant impact on levels and changes in CEO compensation. The practice is controversial and one view is that it is inefficient because...

We test theories of managerial entrenchment and ability matching by examining the relation between CEO turnover and the level of firm diversification. Our results indicate that CEO turnover in diversified firms is completely insensitive to firm performance. Additional analysis indicates that for...

We provide empirical evidence on how the practice of competitive benchmarking affects CEO pay. We find that the use of benchmarking is widespread, and has a significant impact on levels and changes in CEO compensation. The practice is controversial and one view is that it is inefficient because...

We construct a large sample of both private and public firms from a broad set of industries to provide a direct comparison of efficiency, profitability, and incentive alignment. We find that operating profit scaled by sales and net profit to sales in private firms are less than half those in...

We examine the role of board connections in explaining how the controversial practice of backdating employee stock options spread to a large number of firms across a wide range of industries. The increase in the likelihood that a firm begins to backdate stock options that can be explained by...