We investigate the impact of CEO’s happiness on firm innovation in China. As happiness is difficult to measure, we use CEO’s age based on the Happiness Curve theory. We find that when CEOs are in their less happy midlife stage, they more actively promote higher reward and risk innovation...

We find that managers receive more risk-taking incentives in their compensation packages once their firms are referenced by credit default swap (CDS) trading, particularly when institutional ownership is high and when firms are in financial distress. These findings provide suggestive evidence...

This paper analyses the effect of financial distress risk on the initial compensation contracts of new executives in the UK, where credit markets are more concentrated than in the US. We find that financial distress risk has a negative and statistically significant impact on the level of...