This paper examines the effect of risk-taking incentives on acquisition investments. We find that CEOs with risk-taking incentives are more likely to invest in acquisitions. Economically, an inter-quartile range increase in vega translates into an approximately 4.22% enhancement in acquisition...

This paper shows that coordinated monitoring by institutional investors affects how firms behave in the M&A market. We employ the spatial dimension of geographic links between major institutions as a proxy for interaction and information exchange—a process that determines the effectiveness of...

Corporate governance systems exist to discourage self-interested behavior. One question that is often overlooked is how extensive these systems should be. A look at corporate governance today suggests that self-interest is high because companies are compelled - by regulators and the market - to...

For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

Public outrage over executive compensation reached an all time high during the financial crisis. Around the world, many argued that CEOs and boards were immoral in setting their pay and pressured governments to impose restrictions on executive pay. Using a unique sample of data on human values...

This paper examines some of the implications that technological innovations have had on the retail side of the commercial banking industry in the recent decade. These innovations enabled financial institutions to overcome previous constraining “blockages” to growth and costs savings, such as...

Why do scholars and activists pay such close attention to how executive compensation is structured? Appropriate pay structure has traditionally been seen as a mechanism for reducing agency costs imposed on public firms by managers. But as that view has lost explanatory power in recent years, the...

We examine the effect of technology spillovers on the duration of executive compensation contracts. We find that in the presence of greater technology spillovers, firms tend to grant longer duration compensation contracts to their executives. This finding is consistent with theoretical...

This paper addresses the question of how the principal's surplus and agency costs depend on the agent's wealth. Our main results are: If the agent has an additively separable utility function in income and effort and his degree of absolute prudence is smaller than three times the agent's degree...