This study examines contingencies written in firms’ material product market contracts, focusing on i) exogenous uncertainty as an ex-ante determinant, and ii) operating efficiency and market beta as ex-post consequences. We extract material contracts from firms’ public regulatory filings and...

Given CEOs' substantial equity portfolios, much recent literature on CEO incentives regards cash-based bonus plans as largely irrelevant, begging the question of why nearly all CEO compensation plans include such bonuses. We develop a new measure of bonus plan incentives, and document that...

We examine how constraints on directors' availability to serve on boards influence their labor market outcomes. We find that directors who lose (or leave) a board are more likely to subsequently gain a new board seat, regardless of their performance on the departed board, suggesting that...

Executive bonus plans often incorporate performance measures that exclude particular costs—a practice we refer to as “cost shielding.” Based on an agency theoretic framework, we predict that boards use cost shielding to (i) mitigate managerial myopia and (ii) encourage newer executives to...

We examine the relation between shareholder activism and voluntary disclosure. An important consequence of voluntary disclosure is less adverse selection in the capital markets. One class of traders that finds less adverse selection unprofitable is activist investors who target mispriced firms...