When brokers, analysts, and fund managers buy or sell stocks for their own accounts, these “access employees” of financial institutions outperform retail investors over short windows up to a month. They earn particularly high abnormal returns when they trade before earnings announcements,...

This study examines the determinants of CEO compensation using data from a nationally representative sample of privately held U.S. corporations. We find that (i) the pay-size elasticity is much larger for privately held firms than for the publicly traded firms on which previous research has...

We examine executive compensation using data from two nationally representative samples of small privately held U.S. corporations conducted ten years apart — in 1993 and 2003. We find that executive pay at small privately held firms increases with firm size and varies widely by industry,...

We provide measures of absolute and relative equity agency costs for corporations under different ownership and management structures. Our base case is Jensen and Meckling's (1976) zero agency-cost firm, where the manager is the firm's sole shareholder. We utilize a sample of 1,708 small...

Corporate directors earn abnormal returns when they buy their own company's stock as insiders. Directors also outperform when they buy stocks with an interlock connection, where a co-board member is an insider. Directors do not consistently earn abnormal returns when they sell these connected...