A long-standing controversy is whether CEO employment contracts insulate inferior managers from discipline leading to shareholder wealth destruction, or whether contracts alleviate managerial risk aversion and encourage value-enhancing decisions. Using a unique dataset on S&P 500 CEO employment...

Using CEO severance contracts during 1992-2010, we find that CEOs with a severance contract tend to reduce corporate investments, impede innovation, and decrease firm risk across several dimensions, leading to shareholder value destruction. This negative value effect is stronger during the...

We explore the impact of director social capital on credit ratings. Social capital is often associated with trust and cultivated through one's personal networks. We show that firms which employ well-connected directors benefit with a higher credit rating. This result is amplified for firms that...

Our paper examines the relationship between industry tournament incentives for CEOs and corporate innovation. We find that the external pay gap is positively associated with subsequent innovation output and its economic value. Our results are robust to using different industry classifications,...

We study whether changes in corporate governance and CEO power affect bonus-based implicit relative performance evaluation (RPE). We rely on a regression discontinuity design of shareholder proposals to proxy for shocks to CEO power. The effect of shareholder proposals on RPE is stronger under...