This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the taxation of top-income earners by empirically investigating the impact of tax policy changes on pay without performance. Using data on executive compensation in the United States, I compare the sensitivity of executive compensation to...

Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that interests of labor may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based...

This paper investigates whether observed executive compensation contracts are designed to provide risk-taking incentives in addition to effort incentives. We develop a stylized principal-agent model that captures the interdependence between firm risk and managerial incentives. We calibrate the...