Research Question/Issue: Do large, within-firm executive pay differences hurt firm performance? Prior literature shows mixed results concerning the sign of the relationship between executive pay disparity and firm performance. This study evaluates that literature, clarifies what tournament...

Based on the recent SEC-mandated disclosures of CEO-worker pay ratios, we find that firms significantly decrease (increase) their CEO-worker pay ratios when their prior pay ratios are high (low) relative to peers. More importantly, the decrease in pay ratio among high pay ratio firms is...

The large compensation received by bank executives is among the many factors blamed for the risk-taking that led to the 2008-2009 financial crisis. We test whether and how pay disparities between CEO and non-CEO executives—the so-called CEO pay gap—influenced risk taking at publicly traded...

I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee compensation and performance. I next create...