Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We derive novel incidence and optimum formulas for the overall rate of tax progressivity and the top tax rates on total earnings and bonuses, when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms. Optimal taxes account...

The provision of social incentives in the workplace, where performance benefits a charitable cause, has been frequently used in modern organizations. In this paper, we quantify the impact of social incentives on performance under two incentive schemes: piece rate and a winner-take-all...

Group-based incentive pay is attractive in contexts where production is complex and interdependent, yet freeriding is a paramount concern. We assess the introduction of group-based performance pay in a modern industrial production setting using difference-in-difference estimation. Performance...

Much of the literature on performance-related pay (PRP) and poor health relies on self-reported data, and the relationship is particularly difficult to examine due to confounding variables. To address these limitations we examine three groups of health measures using data from the UKHLS: blood...

A growing number of firms offer compensation packages that link pay to performance. The aim is to motivate workers to be more efficient while also increasing their attachment to the company, thereby reducing turnover and absenteeism. The effects of performance-related pay on productivity depend...

Medicare has increased the use of performance pay incentives for hospitals, with the goal of increasing care coordination across providers, reducing market frictions, and ultimately to improve quality of care. This paper provides new empirical evidence by using novel operations and claims data...

We examine a general equilibrium dynamic economy in which each firm i) hires a manager who can divert cash flows and ii) can fire him after poor performance, generating costs to both parties.The contract is terminated when the manager's continuation value reaches his compensation at another firm...

Incentive schemes that reward participants based on their relative performance are often thought to be particularly risk-inducing. Using a novel, real-effort task experiment in the laboratory, we find that the relationship between incentives and risk-taking is more nuanced and depends critically...

Eighty-nine percent of S&P500 companies report benchmarking CEO pay components. Analyzing a panel of CEO compensation data entailing 1,251 S&P 1500 firms during 2007-2013, we find that: 1) total compensation benchmarking less effectively explains CEO compensation than does component-of-pay...

We use payroll data on 1.2 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sector to identify incentive pay in the critical banking segments of treasury/capital market management and investment banking for 66 banks. We document an economically significant correlation of...

This paper provides a robust and practical framework for assessing performance fees. The fee valuation uses standard option pricing models and therefore does not require any expected return or alpha estimate. These features make our framework easy to use, robust, and widely applicable to a...

This paper shows that the use of performance pay schemes has risen substantially across Europe from fewer than one-fifth in 2000 up to one-third in 2015, using data from the European Working Conditions Survey and the Structure of Earnings Survey enriched with external contextual data. This...

We survey directors and investors on the objectives, constraints, and determinants of CEO pay. 67% of directors would sacrifice shareholder value to avoid controversy on CEO pay, implying they face significant constraints other than participation and incentive compatibility. These constraints...

We examine the impact of optimistic directors that are members of boards and compensation committees on CEOs compensation. We find that optimistic boards and compensation committees reward CEOs with a higher proportion of equity-based compensation. We utilize two natural experiments,...

As of 2019, salary history bans have been enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws...

This paper estimates the risk premium in CEO incentive compensation. Using detailed U.S. CEO contract compensation data and simulation analysis, we find that CEOs with riskier pay packages are paid more. The estimated risk premium from total incentive pay represents 15% of total pay. We further...

The consensus in social psychology is that monetary incentives for performance have a detrimental impact on individual performance. Yes, under certain specific and limited conditions, rewards can reduce performance. Yet pay for performance schemes are ubiquitous. How can we resolve this...

We examine how the level and structure of CEO pay is influenced by the characteristics and past experience of the members of the compensation committee, and also how these characteristics and experiences affect the probability of committee appointment. Our main findings indicate that (1) CEO pay...

We find a negative relation between hedge fund manager’s personal income tax rates and fund performance. Using changes in tax deferral regulation or state-level tax rates suggest causality in the tax-performance relation. Managers are less likely to hold stocks with greater information...

In the empirical estimation of the relation between CEO pay and both firm and peer performance, researchers typically include conventional accounting-based measures that reflect firm performance net of executive pay expense. We analytically show that when firms evaluate CEO performance relative...

In this study, I examine whether taxes influence the design of executive compensation incentives. Recently, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) removed the requirement that bonus plans be tied to objective and verifiable performance measures for the bonus to be tax deductible. A potential...

We survey directors and investors on the objectives, constraints, and determinants of CEO pay. 67% of directors would sacrifice shareholder value to avoid controversy on CEO pay, implying they face significant constraints other than participation and incentive compatibility. These constraints...

Because prior studies find mixed results on the relation between CEOs’ pay performance incentives and a firm’s likelihood of financial reporting fraud, we restudy their relationship using innovative research methods. First, we concentrate on incentives from granting options rather than...

This paper examines whether the motivation of institutional investors in monitoring a firm can influence CEO compensation. We find that greater motivated monitoring institutional ownership is associated with a higher pay-performance sensitivity of CEO compensation, which cannot be explained by...

Executive pay clawback provisions require executives to repay previously received compensation under certain circumstances, such as a downward adjustment to the financial results upon which their incentive pay was predicated. The use of these provisions is on the rise, and the SEC is expected to...

Developments in executive compensation have resulted in more legislation and regulations on executive pay being introduced over the past two decades than in the previous hundred and fifty years. Ever since the last financial crisis, executive compensation has remained high on the agenda of many...

This article looks at the individual elements of compensation packages as well as design features of short-term and long-term incentive plans (STIPs and LTIPs) among CEOs and senior executives of Russell 3000 companies. Data is from companies that filed proxy statements between July 1, 2019, and...

This paper develops an account of the role and significance of managerial power and rent extraction in executive compensation. Under the optimal contracting approach to executive compensation, which has dominated academic re-search on the subject, pay arrangements are set by a board of directors...

Variable pay, defined as pay that is tied to some measure of a firm's output, has become more important for executives of the typical American firm. Variable pay is usually touted as a way to provide incentives to managers whose interests may not be perfectly aligned with those of owners. The...

This study explores the relationships between CEO performance targets, the pay incentives associated with those targets, and firm investment for companies listed on the FTSE All-Share index (as of April 2020) from 2013 to 2019. The study has 3 aims: explore the prevalence of different...

We survey directors and investors on the objectives, constraints, and determinants of CEO pay. 67% of directors would sacrifice shareholder value to avoid controversy on CEO pay, implying they face significant constraints other than participation and incentive compatibility. These constraints...

The government is facing a severe shortage of skilled workers. The conventional wisdom in branches of policy and public administration is that the shortage is driven by low salaries that are not competitive for attracting top talent. Using longitudinal data on high skilled workers between 1993...

The primary purpose of this study is to explore the determinants of CEO bonus compensation: to examine CEO bonuses and to explore whether or not the independent variables are associated with CEO bonus compensation. For the purposes of this study, a sample of 2,448 CEO bonus compensations across...