Many believe that compensation, misaligned from shareholders' value due to managerial entrenchment, caused financial firms to take creative risks before the Financial Crisis of 2008. We argue instead that even in a classical principal-agent setting without entrenchment and with exogenous...

We study the relationship between compensation and risk-taking among finance firms using a neglected insight from principal-agent contracting with hidden action and risk-averse agents. If the sensitivity of pay to stock price or slope does not vary with stock price volatility, then total...