stock option repricing and its alternatives an empirical examination in this paper i examine the likelihood of ceo stock option repricing and its alternatives namely option grant stock grant and do nothing multinomial logit results suggest that firms reprice options to increase sensitivity of pay to stock price and to temper down sensitivity of pay to volatility moreover repricing firms are younger and more concentrated in industries where human capital is important finally i find no evidence that internal governance or executive conflicts of interest are relevant in explaining repricing my results indicate that repricing is motivated by incentive alignment and retention and not by agency cost considerations

liquidity constraints and housing prices theory and evidence from the va mortgage program abstract this paper employs a simple intertemporal model to show that presence of liquidity constraints can depress the price of a durable good below its net present rental value regardless of the overall supply elasticity the existence of price effects implies that the relaxation of liquidity constraints is not pareto improving and may in fact be regressive historical evidence which exploits the fact that a clearly identifiable group war veterans enjoyed the most favored access to mortgage credit after world war ii supports the model the results suggest that more recent mortgage market innovations have served primarily to increase prices rather than home ownership rates and that such innovations have the potential to exacerbate socioeconomic disparities in ownership rates

a multiplicative model of optimal ceo incentives in market equilibrium this paper presents a unified theory of both the level and sensitivity of pay in competitive market equilibrium by embedding a moral hazard problem into a talent assignment model by considering multiplicative specifications for the ceo s utility and production functions we generate a number of different results from traditional additive models first both the ceo s low fractional ownership the jensen murphy incentives measure and its negative relationship with firm size can be quantitatively reconciled with optimal contracting and thus need not reflect rent extraction second the dollar change in wealth for a percentage change in firm value divided by annual pay is independent of firm size and therefore a desirable empirical measure of incentives third incentive pay is effective at solving agency problems with multiplicative impacts on firm value such as strategy choice however additive issues such as perk consumption are best addressed through direct monitoring jel d2 d3 g34 j3

asymmetric benchmarking in compensation executives are rewarded for good luck but not penalized for bad abstract principal agent theory suggests that a manager should be paid relative to a benchmark that removes the effect of market or sector performance on the firm s own performance recently it has been argued that such indexation is not observed in the data because executives can set pay in their own interests that is they can enjoy pay for luck as well as pay for performance we first show that this argument is incomplete the positive expected return on stock markets reflects compensation for bearing systematic risk if executives pay is tied to market movements they can only expect to receive the market determined return for risk bearing this argument however assumes that executive pay is tied to bad luck as well as to good luck if executives can truly influence the setting of their pay they will seek to have their performance benchmarked only when it is in their interest namely when the benchmark has fallen using industry benchmarks we find significantly less pay for luck when luck is down in which case pay for luck would reduce compensation than when it is up these empirical results are robust to a variety of alternative hypotheses and robustness checks and they suggest that the average executive loses 25 45 less pay from bad luck than is gained from good luck

the power of parties evidence from close municipal elections in norway we show that small shifts in representation can affect policy in proportional election systems using data from norway we find that a larger left wing party leads to more property taxation higher child care spending and less elderly care spending while local public goods appear to be a non partisan issue these effects are partly due to shifts in bloc majorities and partly due to changes in the left right position of the council keeping the majority constant the estimates on spending allocations are rather imprecise but they are consistent with evidence on politicians fiscal preferences and patterns in media attention this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

public versus private governance a study of incentives and operational performance abstract this study explores incentives and performance in organizations governed by publicly elected boards of directors and subsidized by taxes such organizations are likely to underpay chief executive officers ceos resulting in selection and incentive problems and hence poor operating performance we compare municipal district hospitals to private nonprofit hospitals ceo compensation in district hospitals is significantly lower than in the nonprofits operating margins in district hospitals are lower and deteriorate more rapidly over time we rule out a number of other factors that could explain differences in performance we conclude that the weak governance structure hampers district hospitals

the use of stock based pay for sorting an empirical analysis of compensation for new ceos examining stock based compensation for newly hired ceos this article finds that the sensitivity of stock based pay to performance is higher for new economy young and volatile firms of the components of stock based pay it is option grants that generate such variation across firms it also finds that this cross firm variation in pay performance sensitivity is more pronounced for the ceo s first year in office these findings support the view that firms use stock based pay to new ceos for sorting

transitions from home to marriage of young americans the paper examines the impact of income on the transitions between home living independently and first marriage of young americans a matching model is outlined similar to that used in theories of job search to explain the probability of marriage and living alone a multiple state multiple transition model which allows for correlated heterogeneity on the first and subsequent transitions is estimated the results show that income has a strong and significant effect the impact of unobserved heterogeneity is examined in detail the impact of the young person s earnings on the transitions is explored through simulation

reaching for the stars who pays for talent in innovative industries innovative firms need to hire and motivate highly talented workers this article connects the potential returns to innovation to the structure of compensation for skilled employees we show that the software firms that operate in software sectors with high potential upside gains to innovation pay more to star workers than do other firms that operate in stable markets firms operating in product domains with highly skewed positive returns pay employees more in up front starting salaries and offer higher compensation growth the large estimated effects on earnings are robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls for worker and firm characteristics

do tax reforms affect firm performance and executive remuneration evidence from a compressed wage environment the agency framework predicts a strong positive relationship between executive effort pay and firm performance we study how changes in norwegian payroll tax legislation and earnings tax which influence ceos return on effort affect firm performance and executive earnings for over 11 800 firms both reduced payroll tax and reduced marginal earnings tax increase firm performance measured by firms operating margins in the latter case total pay increases but contingent on the return on firm performance the fixed wage drops the sensitivity of the remuneration scheme to the earnings tax depends on ceo productivity and effort costs

underwater options and the dynamics of executive pay to performance sensitivities we empirically analyze the dynamics of executives pay to performance sensitivities option pay to performance sensitivities become weaker as options fall underwater often leading to pressures to reprice options or restore pay to performance sensitivity in other ways building a detailed data set on executives portfolios of stock and options we find that the responsiveness of pay to performance sensitivities created by all executive holdings of stock and options to changes in stock price is large the elasticity of pay to performance sensitivities with respect to stock price decreases is about 0 7 and is larger for high option executives and for executives with high percentages of options already underwater the dominant mechanism through which companies offset declines in option pay to performance sensitivities is larger option grants following stock price declines on average these larger grants restore approximately 40 of the stock price induced pay to performance sensitivity declines option repricings are inconsequential in this regard despite the attention they have attracted in looking at positive returns we find the reverse higher returns both directly increase pay to performance sensitivities and lead to larger option grants which raise pay to performance sensitivities further thus option grants to executives tend to be largest following large stock price increases or large stock price decreases

economic and psychological perspectives on ceo compensation a review and synthesis to many the principal agent model is the obvious lens through which executive pay should be viewed such a sentiment sits uncomfortably with a large number of empirical studies suggesting that the process of determining executive pay seems to be more readily explained by recourse to arguments of managerial power and influence this article investigates the micro underpinnings of boardroom behavior in order to explain this departure from principal agency theory s argument that executive compensation serves to align interests between the owners of the company and its senior managers we find that there are strong interaction effects among social influence variables and the social setting of boardroom activity generous pay awards bearing only a weak connection to corporate performance are explained in the context of the social psychology of the boardroom these results and a review of the empirical research suggest the need for a more comprehensive model of executive compensation that incorporates both economic and psychological determinants copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

the impact of regulation on ceo labor markets i examine empirically whether the executive labor market helps to slot managers with higher education quality into jobs where they can obtain greater returns from their human capital skills comparing a sample of regulated gas and electric firms with manufacturing firms i find that utilities attract ceos with a lower quality education than do unregulated firms comparing a sample of airline firms pre and postderegulation airlines have ceos with a higher quality education postderegulation these results suggest that the labor market slots ceos with a lower quality of education into regulated business environments

mps for sale returns to office in postwar british politics many recent studies show that firms profit from connections to influential politicians but less is known about how much politicians financially benefit from wielding political influence we estimate the returns to serving in parliament using original data on the estates of recently deceased british politicians applying both matching and a regression discontinuity design to compare members of parliament mps with parliamentary candidates who narrowly lost we find that serving in office almost doubled the wealth of conservative mps but had no discernible financial benefits for labour mps conservative mps profited from office largely through lucrative outside employment they acquired as a result of their political positions we show that gaining a seat in parliament more than tripled the probability that a conservative politician would later serve as a director of a publicly traded firm enough to account for a sizable portion of the wealth differential we suggest that labour mps did not profit from office largely because trade unions collectively exerted sufficient control over the party and its mps to prevent members from selling their services to other clients

tax subsidies to owner occupied housing an asset market approach inflation reduces the effective cost of homeownership and raises the tax subsidy to owner occupation this paper presents an asset market model of the housing market and estimates how changes in the expected inflation rate affect the real price of houses and the equilibrium size of the housing capital stock simulation results suggest that the accelerating inflation of the 1970s which substantially reduced homeowners user costs could have accounted for as much as a 30 percent increase in real house prices persistent high inflation rates could lead ultimately to a sizable increase in the stock of owner occupied housing

do parties matter for economic outcomes a regression discontinuity approach a long standing issue in political economics is to what extent party control makes a difference in determining fiscal and economics policies this question is very difficult to answer empirically because parties are not randomly selected to govern political entities this article uses a regression discontinuity design namely party control changes discontinuously at 50 of the vote share which can produce near experimental causal estimates of the effect of party control on economic outcomes the method is applied to a large panel data set from swedish local governments with a number of attractive features the results show that there is an economically significant party effect left wing governments spend and tax 2 3 more than right wing governments left wing governments also have 7 lower unemployment rates which is partly due to that left wing governments employ 4 more workers than right wing governments jel c21 d72 d78 h71 h72

the private returns to public office we study the wealth accumulation of indian state politicians using public disclosures required of all candidates the annual asset growth of winners is 3 5 percent higher than that of runners up a difference that holds also in a set of close elections the relative asset growth of winners is greater in more corrupt states and for those holding ministerial positions these results are consistent with a rent seeking explanation for the relatively high rate of growth in winners assets

are incentive contracts rigged by powerful ceos we argue that some powerful ceos induce boards to shift the weight on performance measures toward the better performing measures thereby rigging incentive pay a simple model formalizes this intuition and gives an explicit structural form on the rigged incentive portion of ceo wage function using u s data we find support for the model s predictions rigging accounts for at least 10 of the compensation to performance sensitivity and it increases with ceo human capital and firm volatility moreover a firm with rigged incentive pay that is one standard deviation above the mean faces a subsequent decrease of 4 8 in firm value and 7 5 in operating return on assets

a theory of wage dynamics a dynamic equilibrium model of long term implicit labour contracts under incomplete but symmetric information is developed workers are assumed to be risk averse and of unknown ability or productivity risk neutral firms learn as do workers about each worker s productivity by observing the worker s output over time it is shown that equilibrium contracts provide for wages which never decline with age and increase only when the worker s market value increases above his current wage in addition to characterizing the equilibrium wage contract we also derive some of its implications for the behaviour of aggregate wages across various groups of workers these implications explain some findings in the recent empirical literature on ageearnings profiles in particular our model can explain why earnings may be positively related to experience even after controlling for productivity as some empirical studies have indicated

on the returns to holding political office is it worth it abstract the paper estimates causal effects of being elected in a local election on monetary returns the claim for causality is made in a research design where the income of some candidate who just barely won a seat is compared to that of some other candidate who was close to winning a seat for the same party but ultimately did not this research design is made possible thanks to a comprehensive detailed data set covering all swedish politicians who have run for office in the period 1991 2006 the analysis establishes that monetary returns from local politics are absent both in the short and long run by relating this null result to effects on the future political career the paper provides suggestive evidence that local politicians are not primarily motivated by money

measuring firm size in empirical corporate finance abstract in empirical corporate finance firm size is commonly used as an important fundamental firm characteristic however no research comprehensively assesses the sensitivity of empirical results in corporate finance to different measures of firm size this paper fills this hole by providing empirical evidence for a measurement effect in the size effect in particular we examine the influences of employing different proxies total assets total sales and market capitalization of firm size in 20 prominent areas in empirical corporate finance research we highlight several empirical implications first in most areas of corporate finance the coefficients of firm size measures are robust in sign and statistical significance second the coefficients on regressors other than firm size often change sign and significance when different size measures are used unfortunately this suggests that some previous studies are not robust to different firm size proxies third the goodness of fit measured by r squared also varies with different size measures suggesting that some measures are more relevant than others in different situations fourth different proxies capture different aspects of firm size and thus have different implications therefore the choice of size measures needs both theoretical and empirical justification finally our empirical assessment provides guidance to empirical corporate finance researchers who must use firm size measures in their work

the neoclassical firm under moral hazard we develop a model of the neoclassical firm under moral hazard with endogenous capital and employment and perfectly competitive capital labor and product markets we assume that effort becomes harder to measure as the firm gets larger and the exogenous parameters are affiliated the model explains why incentives decline but wages rise with firm size the mixed evidence on the risk reward tradeoff and the positive correlation between wages and profits in the long run incentives are increasing in risk via endogenous capital finally the model makes novel predictions about the relationship between incentives and labor market conditions

ceo incentives and firm size we develop a model that clarifies how to measure ceo incentive strength and how to reconcile the enormous differences in pay sensitivities between executives in large and small firms the crucial parameter is shown to be the elasticity of ceo productivity with respect to firm size we find that ceo marginal products rise significantly with firm size confirming rosen s conjecture that ceos of large firms have a chain letter effect on firm performance and overall ceo incentives are roughly constant or decline slightly with firm size we employ a multitask model to discuss implications for the design of control systems

optimal managerial contracts and equilibrium security prices recent developments in economic theory have focused attention on efficient methods for providing incentives within a corporation especially to top management jensen meckling 12 have examined some implications of incentive or agency problems for corporate finance in this paper we combine a simple model of security market equilibrium with that of an optimal managerial incentive contract using results of harris raviv 8 and holmstrom 9 we provide a rationale for including security prices in the managerial incentive contracts of publicly held firms in this model we also show that non systematic diversifiable risks will be considered in the capital budgeting decisions of a managerial firm operated in the interests of its stockholders this is in contrast to the implication of the arbitrage pricing theory a similar result follows from the capital asset pricing model which abstracts from incentive problems and suggests that only systematic risks ought to be considered the optimal contract model of the corporation takes the following view of the firm since decision makers within a firm are not sole owners of the business but employed agents the decisions which they make depend on the incentives which the organization provides these incentives are embodied explicitly in employment contracts and implicitly through the threat of dismissal or effect on reputation the contract whether explicit or not describes the decision maker s anticipation of the consequences to him conditional on various observable outcomes these outcomes are used to provide information useful in determining whether he did his job properly in the simplest optimal contract scenario there is a single principal and a single agent whose decision concerns the level of effort he expends the level of effort affects the level of output of the firm but not unambiguously because the output is also governed by other stochastic elements as a result some information about the agent s level of effort can be inferred

wealth and executive compensation using new data on the wealth of swedish ceos i show that higher wealth ceos receive stronger incentives since high wealth excluding own firm holdings implies low absolute risk aversion this is consistent with a risk aversion explanation to examine whether wealth is likely to proxy for power i use lagged wealth typically measured before the ceo was hired and the results remain for one of two incentive measures also the wealth incentive result is not stronger for ceos likely to face limited owner oversight finally wealth is unrelated to pay levels and is hence unlikely to proxy for skill the compensation of chief executives of large listed companies is often largely in the form of risky instruments such as shares and options since share prices are affected by many factors outside management control this exposes ceos to risk according to standard agency theory the risk inherent in incentive compensation should reduce optimal incentives looking across firms the evidence that volatile stock prices reduce incentives in actual compensation has been mixed see e g aggarwal and samwick 1999 core and guay 2001 and prendergast 2002 for different views the importance of risk for incentives is thus in dispute 1 this paper takes another look at ceo incentives exploiting variation in risk aversion rather than risk decreasing absolute risk aversion implies that a wealthy ceo is less risk averse than a similar same coefficient of relative risk aversion but less wealthy ceo wealth should therefore proxy for risk aversion wealth may also be related to ceo skill and power obviously using wealth variation empirically hinges on having adequate data on individual wealth i use swedish tax filings to construct a proxy of wealth in sweden tax authorities provide data on aggregate yearly income

ceo talent ceo compensation and product market competition abstract we develop a structural industry equilibrium model to show how competitive chief executive officer ceo firm matching and product markets jointly determine firm value and ceo pay we analytically derive testable implications for the effects of product market characteristics on firm size ceo pay and ceo impact on firm value ceo talent matters more in more competitive markets with greater product substitutabilities our ceo impact estimates are much higher than those obtained by previous structural approaches that abstract away from ceo market segmentation the estimates differ across industries primarily due to variation in product market competition rather than variation in the ceo talent distribution

the other side of the trade off the impact of risk on executive compensation the principal agent model of executive compensation is of central importance to the modern theory of the firm and corporate governance yet the exiting empirical evidence supporting it is quite wea

an equilibrium model of asset pricing and moral hazard this article develops an integrated model of asset pricing and moral hazard it is demonstrated that the expected dollar return of a stock is independent of managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk but the equilibrium price of the stock depends on them thus the expected rate of return is affected by managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk it is shown however that managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk affect the expected rate of return through their influence on systematic risk rather than serve as independent risk factors it is also shown that the risk aversion of the principal in the model leads to less emphasis on relative performance evaluation than

executive compensation and principal agent theory the empirical literature on executive compensation generally fails to specify a model of executive pay on which to base and test hypotheses regarding its determinants in contrast this paper analy

intergenerational support and the life cycle incomes of young men and their parents human capital investments coresidence and intergenerational financial transfers this article examines the resource allocations of parents in the form of both shared residence with and financial transfers to their young adult sons based on an overlapping generations model incorporating a game between parents and adult children estimates of the determinants of such transfers are obtained from the kinship linked cohorts of the national longitudinal surveys the estimates suggest that both types of parental assistance are as important as governmental transfers in supporting young men and are responsive to the current and anticipated earnings of their offspring suggesting that young men cannot adequately smooth their consumption without parental help

the effect of interest rates on home buying evidence from a shock to mortgage insurance premiums abstract regression discontinuity estimates indicate that home buying is highly responsive to interest rates in a large segment of the population a surprise 50 basis point cut in the effective interest rate for mortgages insured by the federal housing administration fha led to an immediate 14 percent increase in home buying among the fha reliant population we show that this large extensive margin effect arises from the rate cut helping borrowers overcome maximum debt payment to income dti thresholds we conclude that binding dti constraints are an important feature of the mortgage market that amplify the effect of interest rate shocks

overconfidence compensation contracts and capital budgeting a risk averse manager s overconfidence makes him less conservative as a result it is cheaper for firms to motivate him to pursue valuable risky projects when compensation endogenously adjusts to reflect outside opportunities moderate levels of overconfidence lead firms to offer the manager flatter compensation contracts that make him better off overconfident managers are also more attractive to firms than their rational counterparts because overconfidence commits them to exert effort to learn about projects still too much overconfidence is detrimental to the manager since it leads him to accept highly convex compensation contracts that expose him to excessive risk

the effect of competition on executive compensation and incentives evidence from a quasi natural experiment the research was partially funded by fundacao para a ciencia e a tecnologia through the applied microeconomics research unit nima award no pest oe ege ui3181 2014

structural models and endogeneity in corporate finance the link between managerial ownership and corporate performance this paper presents a parsimonious structural model that isolates primary economic determinants of the level and dispersion of managerial ownership firm scale and performance and the empirical associations among them in particular variation across firms and through time of estimated productivity parameters for physical assets and managerial input and corresponding variation in optimal compensation contract and firm size combine to deliver the well known hump shaped relation between tobin s q and managerial ownership to assess the effectiveness of standard econometric approaches to the endogeneity problem we apply those remedies to panel data generated from the model the unfortunate conclusion is that at least in the ownership performance context proxy variables fixed effects and instrumental variables do not generally provide reliable solutions to simultaneity bias

identifying and testing models of managerial compensation this article analyses the identification and empirical content of the pure moral hazard pmh and the hybrid moral hazard hmh principal agent models the pmh model has hidden actions while the hmh model has hidden information in addition to hidden actions in both models agents are risk averse and principals are risk neutral the article derives the equilibrium restrictions from the optimal contract and uses the restrictions to show that the models have empirical content for any given risk aversion parameter the models other parameters are non parametrically point identified the risk aversion parameter and hence the model are however only partially identified management s ability to manipulate accounting reports arises endogenously within hmh models but not in all versions of pmh models we use our framework to investigate whether shareholders contract with management recognizing that accounting reports are susceptible to manipulation and therefore endogenous to the incentives offered to management the data reject all models in which accounting reports are verifiable furthermore the version of the pmh in which accounting reports can be manipulated is rejected if expected compensation is restricted to be positive

are ceos really paid like bureaucrats a common view is that there is little correlation between firm performance and ceo pay using a new fifteen year panel data set of ceos in the largest publicly traded u s companies we document a strong relationship between firm performance and ceo compensation this relationship is generated almost entirely by changes in the value of ceo holdings of stock and stock options in addition we show that both the level of ceo compensation and the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance have risen dramatically since 1980 largely because of increases in stock option grants

optimal exercise prices for executive stock options although exercise prices for executive stock options can be set either below or above the grant date market price in practice virtually all options are granted at the money we offer an economic rationale for this apparent puzzle by showing that pay to performance incentives for risk averse undiversified executives are typically maximized by setting exercise prices at or near the grant date market price we provide an operationally useful alternative to black scholes 1973 for the purpose of both valuing executive stock options and measuring the incentives created by options our framework has implications not only for exercise price policies but also for indexed options option repricings exchanges of cash for stock based compensation and the design of bonus plans

busting the princelings the campaign against corruption in china s primary land market using data on over a million land transactions during 2004 2016 where local governments are the sole seller we find that firms linked to members of china s supreme political elites the politburo obtained a price discount ranging from 55 4 to 59 9 compared with those without the same connections these firms also purchased slightly more land in return the provincial party secretaries who provided the discount to these princeling firms are 23 4 more likely to be promoted to positions of national leadership to curb corruption president xi jinping stepped up investigations and strengthened personnel control at the province level using a spatially matched sample e g within a 500 meter radius we find a reduction in corruption of between 42 6 and 31 5 in the provinces either targeted by the central inspection teams or whose party secretary was replaced by one appointed by xi accordingly this crackdown on corruption has also significantly reduced the promotional prospects of those local officials who rely on supplying a discount to get ahead

parental and public transfers to young women and their children this paper presents estimates of how an increase in welfare benefits for the welfare eligible affects the provision of parental support in the form of both financial transfers and shared residence based on an overlapping generations framework incorporating game theoretic interactions among parents their adult children and the government the empirical results obtained from two longitudinal data sets indicate that the parents view a dollar of income earned by their daughters as equivalent to a dollar increase in welfare benefits however there exists only a small trade off between the generosity of government aid and the incidence of parental aid data are for the united states and are from the national longitudinal survey of young women for 1968 1984 and the national longitudinal survey of youth for 1979 1984 excerpt

are college chief executives paid like corporate ceos or bureaucrats we study compensation of college chief executives from 1997 to 2004 although presidential salaries have acquired the attention of the media congress and the internal revenue service irs in recent years they are much below those of corporate ceos compared with ceos in corporations with comparable sizes college chief executives earn on average approximately one third of the compensation of their corporate counterparts however ceo compensation is more volatile than that of college chief executives our results show that private college presidential salaries are consistent with the prediction of job complexity and institutional reputation hypotheses presidential compensations of public research universities on the other hand are more consistent with the prediction of job complexity hypothesis only hence our findings do not support the prediction of bureaucrat hypothesis for both private and public institutions

financial market imperfections and home ownership a comparative study abstract we explore the determinants of the distribution of owner occupancy rates across age groups using a collection of microeconomic data on 14 oecd countries in most the survey is repeated over time this allows us to construct an international dataset merging data on 39 national household surveys with aggregate data on down payment ratios we find strong evidence that the availability of mortgage finance as measured by down payment ratios affects the distribution of owner occupancy rates across age groups especially at the young end the results are consistent with previous theoretical models and have important implications for the debate on the relation between saving and growth

rent vouchers and the price of low income housing since the early 1980s low income housing subsidies have increasingly shifted towards vouchers which allow recipients to rent in the private market by 1993 vouchers subsidized as many households as lived in traditional housing projects although most low income households did not receive any subsidies this study investigates whether this policy has raised rents for unsubsidized poor households as many analysts predicted when the program was conceived the main finding is that low income households in metropolitan areas with more vouchers have experienced faster rent increases than those where vouchers are less abundant in the 90 biggest metropolitan areas vouchers have raised rents by 16 percent on average a large effect consistent with a low supply elasticity in the low quality rental housing market considered as a transfer program this result implies that vouchers have caused a 8 2 billion increase in the total rent paid by low income non recipients while only providing a subsidy of 5 8 billion to recipients resulting in a net loss of 2 4 billion to low income households

the impact of real rents and wages on household formation although the economic literature has analyzed some components of the headship decision study of household formation has been primarily in the realm of demography the authors expand the demographic model to include economic determinants of the decision to remain with parents or not and to live with a group or separately they focus on measuring the effect of spatial variations in rental costs on the probability of forming a household the authors results based on a sample of 2 573 youths in their twenties indicate that the cost of housing and potential labor earnings are important variables in explaining this probability copyright 1993 by mit press

promotion turnover and compensation in the executive labor market this paper develops a generalized roy model with human capital accumulation moral hazard and career concerns we identify and estimate the model with a large panel that matches data on publicly listed firms to information on their executives the structural estimates obtained are used to decompose the firm size pay gap we find that although total compensation and incentive pay increase with firm size certainty equivalent pay decreases with firm size in larger firms and for more highly ranked executives weaker signal quality about effort results in higher risk premiums this risk premium accounts for roughly 80 percent of the firm size gap in total compensation larger firms are also willing to pay more than smaller ones to attract executives finally the estimated coefficients on human capital accumulation from formal education and experience gained from different firms are individually significant but their collective effect on firm size pay differentials nets out

dynastic political rents economic benefits to relatives of top politicians we exploit close elections in swedish municipalities to test whether relatives of politicians who become mayors obtain economic benefits we find no benefits for the siblings of new mayors but the

corporate performance and managerial remuneration an empirical analysis abstract economic theories of efficient compensation predict a positive relationship between executive pay and corporate performance and yet efforts to document this relationship have been largely unsuccessful in this paper we argue that previous cross sectional studies have omitted important variables which seriously bias their results using data that focus on individual executives over time we find that executive compensation is strongly positively related to corporate performance as measured by shareholder return and growth in firm sales the results are robust to the stock market performance measure utilized

the impact of mortgage interest rate subsidies on household borrowing abstract the responsiveness of household borrowing to changes in the interest rate is a crucial parameter for assessing public policies aimed at promoting saving we estimate the effect on household borrowing of a reform of a program that subsidized interest rates on mortgages signed by medium and low income households the reform established a ceiling in the price of the house that could be financed with the program first we use triple difference estimators exploiting the fact that the reform should affect most the borrowing behavior of eligible individuals living in high price areas and estimate that the elasticity of the probability getting a loan to the interest rate lies between 2 8 and 1 3 second we document that after the reform the distribution of loan sizes became more concentrated at the discontinuity point of the budget constraint of eligible individuals both findings are consistent with a negative response of household borrowing to increases in interest rates

equilibrium warrant pricing models and accounting for executive stock options under apb opinion no 25 compensation expense arising from executive stock options consists of the excess of the market value of the stock over the exercise price of the options on their grant dates if the exercise price equals the market value of the stock on the grant date which is typically the case no compensation expense is recognized this accounting treatment has been frequently criticized for its bias toward underestimating the cost of an option to the issuing firm and a number of alternative valuation models have been suggested in the accounting literature by and large these valuation models have been borrowed from the finance literature where they were developed to explain the pricing of warrants and traded options the purpose of this paper is to assess empirically how well two of these valuation models perform in providing estimates of the value of traded securities warrants that are similar in many respects to executive stock options 2 this evidence should help calibrate the magnitude of the errors

risk aversion performance pay and the principal agent problem this paper calculates numerical solutions to the principal agent problem and compares the results to the stylized facts of ceo compensation the numerical predictions come from parameterizing the models of grossman and hart and of holmstrom and milgrom while the correct incentives for a ceo can greatly enhance a firm s performance providing such incentives need not be expensive for many parameter values ceo compensation need increase only by about 10 for every 1 000 of additional shareholder value for some values the amount is 0 003 cents

lower salaries and no options on the optimal structure of executive pay we estimate a standard principal agent model with constant relative risk aversion and lognormal stock prices for a sample of 598 us ceos the model is widely used in the compensation literature but it predicts that almost all of the ceos in our sample should hold no stock options instead ceos should have lower base salaries and receive additional shares in their companies for a typical value of relative risk aversion almost half of the ceos in our sample would be required to purchase additional stock in their companies from their private savings the model predicts contracts that would reduce average compensation costs by 20 while providing the same incentives and the same utility to ceos we investigate a number of extensions and modi cations of the standard model but nd none of them to be satisfactory we conclude that the standard principal agent model typically used in the literature cannot rationalize observed contracts one reason may be that executive pay contracts are suboptimal

politicians payments in a proportional party system abstract are there monetary returns to politics this question is approached in this paper as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a country with proportional representation system i apply a difference in difference setting with a carefully chosen control group to rich data on candidates to the swedish national parliament both short and long run effects of being elected on different types of income are estimated results show that yes mostly thanks to relatively high remuneration while still in office politics can yield positive monetary returns in the long run however the effect is instead compositional in the sense that ex politicians receive more pension income and work less

does high cost of mortgage debt explain why young adults live with their parents young adults leave their parents homes at a higher rate in northern europe or in the united states than in southern europe with broad implications on labor market mobility and on fertility we assess if differences in household formation are associated to differences in access to credit by estimating the impact of the cost of a mortgage on the probability that a young adult leaves his or her parents home exogenous changes in the cost of credit are identified using the reform in 1998 and the cancellation in 2002 of credito bonificado a portuguese program that provided four different reductions of the interest rate of mortgages signed by low and medium income youth using a unique data set that links administrative records of debt with the 1998 2004 waves of the employment survey we document three findings first borrowing among young adults fell when borrowing costs increased second the elasticity of new household formation with respect to net interest rates lies between 0 8 and 3 3 third young adults responded to the increase in mortgage costs by delaying home purchases or by reducing the quality of housing services purchased but there was only a modest increase of the probability of renting a new accommodation jel d91 h24 j13

ceos outside employment opportunities and the lack of relative performance evaluation in compensation contracts although agency theory suggests that firms should index executive compensation to remove market wide effects i e rpe there is little evidence to support this theory oyer 2004 journal of finance 59 1619 1649 posits that an absence of rpe is optimal if the ceo s reservation wages from outside employment opportunities vary with the economy s fortunes we directly test and find support for oyer s 2004 theory we argue that the ceo s outside opportunities depend on his talent as proxied by the ceo s financial press visibility and his firm s industry adjusted roa our results are robust to alternate explanations such as managerial skimming oligopoly and asymmetric benchmarking

the dependence of pay performance sensitivity on the size of the firm i analyze the relationship between firm size and the extent to which executive compensation depends on the wealth of the firm s shareholders i use a simple agency model to motivate an econometric model of this relationship estimating this model on chief executive officer ceo compensation data using nonlinear least squares i determine that pay performance sensitivity as defined by jensen and murphy 1990b appears to be approximately inversely proportional to the square root of firm size however measured i also analyze the properties of pay performance sensitivity for teams of executives working for the same firm and show it to have similar properties as ceo pay performance sensitivity

work related perks agency problems and optimal incentive contracts work related perks such as corporate jets nice offices and so forth improve the tradeoff between incentives and insurance that determines the optimal incentive contract we show that i such perks may be offered even if their direct consumption benefits are offset by their costs ii they will be offered for free iii agents in more uncertain production environments will receive more perks iv senior executives should receive more perks and v better corporate governance can lead to more perk consumption by ceos our analysis also offers insights into firms decisions about how much autonomy they should grant to their employees

it pays to have friends abstract currently a director is classified as independent if he or she has neither financial nor familial ties to the ceo or to the firm we add another dimension social ties using a unique data set we find that 87 of boards are conventionally independent but that only 62 are conventionally and socially independent furthermore firms whose boards are conventionally and socially independent award a significantly lower level of compensation exhibit stronger pay performance sensitivity and exhibit stronger turnover performance sensitivity than firms whose boards are only conventionally independent our results suggest that social ties do matter and that consequently a considerable percentage of the conventionally independent boards are substantively not

executive compensation a modern primer this article studies traditional and modern theories of executive compensation bringing them together under a simple unifying framework accessible to the general interest reader we analyze assignment models of the level of pay and static and dynamic moral hazard models of incentives and compare their predictions to empirical findings we make two broad points first traditional theories find it difficult to explain the data suggesting that compensation results from rent extraction by ceos however more modern shareholder value theories that arguably better capture the ceo setting do deliver predictions consistent with observed practices suggesting that these practices need not be inefficient second seemingly innocuous features of the modeling setup often made for tractability or convenience can lead to significant differences in the model s implications and conclusions on the efficiency of observed practices we close by highlighting apparent inefficiencies in executive compensation and additional directions for future research