We consider a model of CEO selection, dismissal and retention. Firms with larger blockholder ownership monitor more; they get more information about CEO ability, which facilitates the dismissal of low-ability CEOs. These firms are matched with CEOs whose ability is more uncertain. For retention...

In a standard principal-agent model, we derive a new condition that relates the structure of the optimal contract to the agent's risk preferences: The optimal contract is more convex than the likelihood ratio of the performance measure if and only if the coefficient of absolute prudence is...

A firm that must decide whether to retain or terminate a manager can rely on several sources of information to assess managerial ability. When it relies on a performance signal and monitoring, we show that a more informative signal can surprisingly increase the value of monitoring. Then, signal...

How to incentivize a manager to create value and be socially responsible? A manager can predict how his decisions will affect measures of social performance, and will therefore game an incentive system that relies on these measures. Still, we show that the compensation contract uses measures of...