Compensation of executives by means of equity has long been seen as a means to tie executives' income to company performance, and thus as a solution to the principal-agent dilemma created by the separation of ownership and management in publicly owned companies. The overwhelming part of such...

Milton Friedman has famously claimed that the responsibility of a manager who is not the owner of a firm is "to conduct the business in accordance with their [the shareholders'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible." In this paper we argue that when contracts are...

This study adopts behavioral contract theory through a mathematical model and clarifies the situation in which a fixed–salary contract is preferable to incentives–based one for the principal. Theoretically, the expected utility for the principal is higher under an incentives–based contract...

Classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to induce risk neutrality in otherwise risk averse agents. In an experiment, we find that subjects acting as executives do also take risks that are excessive from the perspective of shareholders if...

Risk-neutral individuals take more risky decisions when they have limited liability.  Risk-neutral managers may not when acting as agents under contract and taking costly actions to acquire informatin before taking decisions.  Limited liability makes it optimal to increase the reward for...

Using data on Executive Compensation from Standard and Poor's ExecuComp, this paper explores the gender gap in top executive jobs and the effect of women CEOs, Chairs, and Directors on the pay of other women executives. The results show a narrowing of the uncorrected gender pay gap from the...

The rationale of RPE use in executive pay is to filter out common risk, not firm idiosyncratic risk. As common risk is often interpreted casually as non-diversifiable and firms’ idiosyncratic risks as totally independent of one another, we show that these casual interpretations contain three...