Shareholders with standard monetary preferences will give a manager incentives to increase firm profits, which can be achieved with equity grants. When shareholders are socially responsible, in the sense that they also value corporate social performance, it is not clear which incentives the...

In a standard principal-agent setting, we use a comparative approach to study the incentives provided by different types of compensation contracts, and their valuation by managers with utility function u who are risk averse (u'' < 0) and prudent (u''' > 0). We show that concave contracts tend to provide more incentives...</0)>

This paper studies the value of more precise signals on agent performance in an optimal contracting model with endogenous effort. With limited liability, the agent's wage is increasing in output only if output exceeds a threshold, else it is zero regardless of output. If the threshold is...

This paper extends a standard principal-agent model of CEO compensation by modeling the progressive attenuation of information asymmetries about firm value by shareholders in continuous time. The dynamics of the stock price process are affected by the continuous accumulation of exogenous shocks,...

Holmström (1979) provides a condition for a signal to have positive value assuming the validity of the first-order approach. This paper extends Holmström's analysis to settings where the first-order approach may not hold. We provide a new condition for a signal to have positive value that...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...