This study provides evidence that managerial incentives, shaped by compensation contracts, help to explain the empirical relationship between uncertainty and investment. We develop a model in which the manager, induced by an incentive contract, makes investment decisions for a firm that faces time-varying volatility. In the model, a manager’s privately optimal investment response to a volatilit...

Economic theory suggests that the use of flat-rate compensation for military recruiters is sub-optimal. We elicited the preferences of U.S. Navy recruiters for a piece-rate compensation scheme, and find many would prefer a modest decrease in fixed salary in exchange for the opportunity to receive a small monetary bonus per high-quality recruit. Under such a bonus scheme, the Navy could hire few...

We measure U.S. publicly traded companies’ exposures to skilled labor risk, i.e., the potential failure in attracting and retaining skilled labor, by the intensity of their discussions on this issue in their 10-K filings. We show that this measure effectively captures firm risk due to the mobility of skilled labor. We find that skilled labor risk is an important determinant of corporate compens...

We present a multiperiod agency model of stock-based executive compensation in a speculative stock market, where investors have heterogeneous beliefs and stock prices may deviate from underlying fundamentals and include a speculative option component. This component arises from the option to sell the stock in the future to potentially overoptimistic investors. We show that optimal compensation ...

As information systems become an important competitive advantage for firms in the information age, how to attract and retain IT professionals through compensation plans has been a critical issue in human resource management. This paper presents the rationale of designing compensation for IT professionals based on the perspectives of agency theory and contingency theory. With rapid change in IT ...

This paper describes the findings of a study aimed at providing a replication and extension in China of studies focused on incentive compensation practices of automobile retailers in the USA and the Netherlands. Rich, detailed data-sets from all three countries are analysed together and in comparison. As theory is not well developed at the level of detail of the data collected, the purpose of t...

This paper extends the literature on executive compensation by developing and testing a principal-agent model in the context of project selection. The model’s focus on executive project selection decisions highlights the multidimensional nature of executive choices that affect the value of the firm. An executive not only makes an effort choice that determines the quality of information on which...

he topic of corporate governance in general, and topmanagement compensation in particular, has received enormous attention in recent years.1 Although an increasing literature has examined various aspects of the corporate governance of manufacturing firms in the United States and abroad, the corporate governance of banks and financial institutions has received relatively less focus. Alignment of...

A clawback provision is the right of a firm to recover from an executive’s compensation as the result of triggering events, such as a financial restatement. We argue that the adoption of clawback provisions may exacerbate a manager’s incentive to avoid financial restatements via earnings management. Only when the accounting verifiability is high, making earnings management very costly, can claw...