In this study, I summarize the current state of executive compensation, discuss measurement and incentive issues, document recent trends in executive pay in both U.S. and international firms, and analyze the evolution of executive pay over the past century. Most recent analyses of executive...

We examine the ex-ante optimality of repricing of executive stock options while considering the tax effects of new accounting rules associated with traditional repricing. Although there has been a body of empirical literature on repricing, the optimality of repricing after considering the...

Existing research documents that firms employing relatively high levels of stock option-based compensation more frequently report quarterly earnings that meet or exceed analysts' forecasts. This paper examines the roles of income-increasing accounting choices and management guidance to analysts...

We investigate the key contractual features of CEO performance-vested (p-v) equity compensation. We hypothesize that contractual features such as relative performance evaluation (RPE), the performance period length, and the number of performance metrics can be configured to improve the...

According to the rent-extraction hypothesis, weak corporate governance allows entrenched CEOs to capture the pay-setting process and benefit from events outside of their control - get paid for luck. In this paper, I find that the independence requirement imposed on boards of directors by the...

Using a recent sample of firms subject to SEC litigations for fraud and employing a detection-controlled estimation technique, we find that equity-based executive compensation (EBC) is positively related to both the probability of fraud commission and the probability of being prosecuted by the...

Pay for non-performance is among the most prominent arguments of executive rent extraction, especially Bertrand and Mullainathan's (2001) pay for luck. We revisit their finding over the last two decades, 1997 through 2016. Pay for luck presents in the first decade but declines in the second...

The persistent outrage over CEO pay expressed by politicians, the press, media, labor unions, and the general public (but not shareholders) have prompted the imposition of a wide range of disclosure requirements, tax policies, accounting rules, governance reforms, direct legislation, and other...