We examine the impact of overconfidence on compensation structure. We test alternative hypotheses, drawing upon and extending existing theories. Our findings support the exploitation hypothesis: firms offer incentive-heavy compensation contracts to overconfident CEOs to exploit their...

CEO dismissals attract considerable attention, presumably because of the visibility, publicity and intrigue that often surrounds the decision to fire the CEO. With the goal of advancing scholarly understanding of CEO dismissals, we examine whether CEO gender influences the likelihood of...

We examine the glass cliff proposition that female CEOs receive more scrutiny than male CEOs by investigating whether CEO gender is related to threats from activist investors in public firms. Activist investors are extra-organizational stakeholders who, when dissatisfied with some aspect of the...

Do executives demand a premium for working in polluted environments? We develop a model of optimal CEO compensation and find empirical support for its prediction that pollution will induce a higher fixed wage, but lower incentive pay. This is the case even if we exclude polluting firms. We...