In this paper we study CEO contract design employing a unique dataset on privately-held and public firm CEO annual compensation over the period 1999-2011. We first show that CEOs in public firms are paid 30% more than CEOs in comparable privately-held firms. We further show that both private and...

Using a hand-collected sample of election nominations for more than 30,000 directors over the period 2001–2010, we construct a novel measure of director proximity to elections called Years-to-election. We find that the closer directors of a board are to their next elections, the higher CEO...