We examine the press' role in monitoring and influencing executive compensation practice using more than 11,000 press articles about CEO compensation from 1994 to 2002. Negative press coverage is more strongly related to excess annual pay than to raw annual pay, suggesting a sophisticated...

Stock and option compensation and the level of managerial equity incentives are aspects of corporate governance that are especially controversial to shareholders, institutional activists, and government regulators. Similar to much of the corporate finance and corporate governance literature,...

This article addresses four major concerns about the pay of U.S. CEOs: (1) failure to pay for performance; (2) excessive levels of pay; (3) failure to index options and other equity-based pay, resulting in windfalls; and (4) too much unwinding of incentives. The authors' main message is that most...

In a recent and influential empirical paper, Francis, LaFond, Olsson, and Schipper (FLOS) [2005. The market pricing of accruals quality. Journal of Accounting and Economics 39, 295-327] conclude that accruals quality (AQ) is a priced risk factor. We explain that FLOS' regressions examining a...