wall street occupations many finance jobs entail the risk of large losses and hard to monitor effort we analyze the equilibrium consequences of these features in a model with optimal dynamic contracting we show that finance jobs feature high compensation up or out promotion and long work hours and are more attractive than other jobs moral hazard problems are exacerbated in booms even though pay increases employees whose talent would be more valuable elsewhere can be lured into finance jobs while the most talented employees might be unable to land these jobs because they are too hard to manage

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

executive compensation strategic competition and relative performance evaluation theory and evidence we examine compensation contracts for managers in imperfectly competitive product markets we show that strategic interactions among firms can explain the lack of relative performance based incentives in which compensation decreases with rival firm performance the need to soften product market competition generates an optimal compensation contract that places a positive weight on both own and rival performance firms in more competitive industries place greater weight on rival firm performance relative to own firm performance we find empirical evidence of a positive sensitivity of compensation to rival firm performance that is increasing in the degree of competition in the industry

moral hazard in risk averse teams holmstrom 1982 has shown that a non budget balancing contract induces a team of risk neutral agents to choose the first best effort levels this is not generally true when agents are risk averse furthermore a massacre contract which punishes all but one agent when the outcome is low can attain the first best over a wider range of parameters than any other budget balancing contract

bureaucrats or politicians part ii multiple policy tasks abstract policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats this paper investigates first the normative criteria with which to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers politicians or non elected bureaucrats politicians are preferable if there is uncertainty about social preferences and flexibility is valuable or if policy complementarities and compensation of losers is important bureaucrats are preferable if time inconsistency and short termism is an issue or if vested interests have large stakes in the policy outcome we then compare this normative benchmark with the case in which politicians choose when to delegate and show that the two generally differ

self enforcing wage contracts we examine long term wage contracts between a risk neutral firm and a risk averse worker when both can costlessly renege and buy or sell labour at a random spot market wage a self enforcing contract is one in which neither party ever has an incentive to renege in the optimum self enforcing contract wages are sticky they are less variable than spot market wages and positively serially correlated they are updated by a simple rule around each spot wage is a time invariant interval and the contract wage changes each period by the smallest amount necessary to bring it into the current interval

an essay on post keynesian theory a new paradigm in economics the impact of keynes s work in the 1930 s has been viewed by some economists as a revolution in economic thinking see lawrence r klein 56 1947 yet to those who were most closely associated with keynes at cambridge during that period the revolution proved largely abortive over the past 30 years many of keynes s critical insights into the workings of a modern technologically advanced economy seem to have been ignored with the result that there has been little fundamental change in the way economists perceive the world those one time associates of keynes joined by a small number of the younger generation at cambridge and elsewhere have consistently tried to highlight the incompatibility of keynes s views with orthodox theory even as they worked to develop more fully a generalization of the general theory see joan robinson 78 1952 this generalization may be said to represent in thomas kuhn s sense 62 1962 a new paradigm and since it extends the analysis set forth in keynes s treatise on money 1930 and the general theory it can be termed post keynesian few american economists seem aware of the major works that have contributed to the development of this new paradigm2 and fewer still even among those likely to be sympathetic seem to be aware of the

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

a bargaining theory of inefficient redistribution policies when two policies are available to achieve the same goal why is the relatively inefficient one often observed we address this question in the context of policies used to redistribute income towards special interest groups sigs in a two stage model in the first stage the set of constraints on policy instruments is chosen in the second stage the government and sigs bargain over the level of the available transfer policies restrictions on the use of efficient policies and the use of inefficient ones reduce the surplus over which sigs and governments can bargain there is however an offsetting effect not generally recognized in models of inefficient redistribution an improvement in the government s bargaining position which allows it to capture a larger share of the surplus we show that this positive effect for the government dominates under plausible conditions inefficient policies are the equilibrium outcome under alternative first stage mechanisms for policy selection such as the election of policymakers or in some cases bargaining between sigs and the government jel classification d7 f13 c70 h23

capital budgets borrowing rules and state capital spending abstract this paper compares the level and composition of government spending in u s states that maintain separate budgets for capital and operating expenditures with that in states that employ unified budgets it also investigates the effects of pay as you go financing rules for capital projects the empirical findings suggest that states with separate capital budgets spend more on public capital projects than comparable states with unified budgets there is no evidence that the presence or absence of a capital budget affects the level of non capital spending pay as you go requirements for financing capital projects are associated with lower levels of both capital and non capital spending

internal competition for corporate resources and incentives in teams invoking thefree rider problem in teams many observersfind profit sharing in large organizations puzzling because it should have negligible incentive effects we show that a firm can be decomposed into two separate teams whose outputs can be observed thenprofit sharing combined with competition between these two teamsfor internal resourcesfrequently solves thefree rider problem using this result we endogenize thefirm s organizational structure and show that in the presence of economies of scale small firms tend to organize as unita y firms while largefirms choose the multidivisional organizationalform

state responses to fiscal crises the effects of budgetary institutions and politics this paper explores the dynamics of state taxes and spending during the late 1980s when regional economic downturns and increased expenditure demands led to substantial state budget deficits more restrictive state fiscal institutions such as no deficit carryover rules and tax and expenditure limitations are correlated with more rapid fiscal adjustment to unexpected deficits political factors are also important when a single party controls the state house and the governorship deficit adjustment is much faster than when party control is divided in gubernatorial election years tax increases and spending cuts are both significantly smaller than at other times

an empirical analysis of risk incentives and the delegation of worker authority the authors empirically test prendergast s 2002 theory that incorporates the delegation of worker authority into the principal agent model to explain the lack of consistent empirical support for a tradeoff between risk and incentives using data from the 1998 british wers the authors investigate whether there is 1 evidence of a risk incentives tradeoff as predicted by the principal agent model 2 evidence of a positive relationship between incentive pay and the delegation of worker authority 3 evidence of a positive relationship between risk and authority 4 support for the main testable implication of prendergast s model namely that the evidence favoring a risk incentives tradeoff should strengthen when authority controls are added to the empirical model the answers are affirmative for all four questions thereby providing evidence clarifying the relationship between risk and incentive pay and how managers optimally bundle incentive pay and the delegation of worker decision rights to cope with

compensation benchmarking leapfrogs and the surge in executive pay scholars frequently argue whether the sharp rise in chief executive officer ceo pay in recent years is efficient or is a consequence of rent extraction because of the failure of corporate governance in individual firms this article argues that governance failure must be conceptualized at the market rather than the firm level because excessive pay increases for even relatively few ceos a year spread to other firms through the cognitively and rhetorically constructed compensation networks of peer groups which are used in the benchmarking process to negotiate the compensation of ceos counterfactual simulation based on standard and poor s execucomp data demonstrates that the effects of ceo leapfrogging potentially explain a considerable fraction of the overall upward movement of executive compensation since the early 1990s

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

post keynesian economics towards coherence this paper provides a comprehensive survey of post keynesian economics it argues that post keynesian economics has passed through the important initial stage of mounting a concerted critique of mainstream economics the focus however is on the stage reflected in current post keynesian research which the paper argues is concerned with elaborating a distinctive coherent approach that takes precedence over critique several traditions upon which post keynesian economics relies are identified institutionalism is proposed as an additional contributing tradition a novel aspect of the paper it is recognized however that more research is necessary to complete the post keynesian approach c 1996 academic press limited copyright 1996 by oxford university press

broad based employee stock options grants and ipo firms this paper examines the broad based grant of employee stock options esos in the period following the initial public offering ipo stock option grants are used to reduce the negative effects of conflicts of interests associated with a firm s going public the study documents that option grants can be seen as corporate governance instruments for a number of model specifications also it is found that there is a robust relation between option grants and market and accounting returns respectively to the best of the authors knowledge no previous study has investigated the determinants of the grants of employee stock options in the post ipo period to both upper level and lower level executives during a period of sixteen years because the cross sectional data of this study amply encompasses more than a business cycle it is possible to examine the grants of esos across tight and soft labour markets during the former type of labour market it appears that more options are granted also the empirical res

employee bargaining power inter firm competition and equity based compensation abstract we develop a model to illustrate that equity based compensation for non executive employees and product market decisions are related when the product market is competitive and employees have low bargaining power the unique equilibrium is for each firm s owners to offer equity based compensation to their employees in this setting equity based compensation leads to a lower wage rate which makes each firm more competitive with its rival however this unique equilibrium is a prisoner s dilemma for the firms original owners our results are consistent with several empirical regularities and provide predictions on when firms will offer equity based compensation to their employees

does electoral accountability affect economic policy choices evidence from gubernatorial term limits this paper analyzes the behavior of u s governors from 1950 to 1986 to investigate a reputation building model of political behavior we argue that differences in the behavior of governors who face a binding term limit and those who are able to run again provides a source of variation in discount rates that can be used to test a political agency model we find evidence that taxes spending and other policy instruments respond to a binding term limit if a democrat is in office the result is a fiscal cycle in term limit states which lowers state income when the term limit binds

accountability and incentives of appointed and elected public officials political agency models suggest that elected public officials choose different policies than appointed officials do this paper is the first a to apply a clean empirical design to study whether t

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

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

do housing bubbles generate fiscal bubbles this paper examines the effects of the most recent u s housing bubble on the fiscal policy of california cities we use an instrumental variables approach that helps isolate the fiscal consequences of house price appreciation by taking advantage of the influence of local topological constraints on the elasticity of house prices with respect to interest rates our analysis generates three main findings first despite prop 13 fiscal constraints rapid house price appreciation has a strong effect on property tax revenue second the resulting increase in property tax revenue was largely offset by a reduction in other local tax revenue this offsetting response leaves total city expenditure unrelated to local house prices in that sense the housing bubble did not produce local fiscal bubbles third we find that fiscal adjustments to house price appreciation depend on local political institutions

housing booms and local spending abstract this paper examines how local governments adjust their spending in response to a temporary revenue windfall generated by a housing boom we focus on spanish local governments because of the intensity of the last housing boom bust experienced there and the large share of construction related revenues they obtain we find that windfall revenues were mostly used to increase expenditures above all current we seek to determine whether this behaviour was due to political myopia incumbents in contested elections increasing expenditures to convince uninformed voters about their competence or to extrapolation bias leading to the overstatement of the persistence of revenue shocks we find evidence for both mechanisms the propensity to spend is higher where local incumbents were elected by a narrow vote margin and lower in places with past volatility experience finally we also examine what happens during the bust and find that governments enjoying large windfalls during the boom had to cut their spending abruptly above all capital and raise taxes the adjustment during the bust was actually greater in those places that overspent more during the crisis

business as usual politicians with business experience government finances and policy outcomes abstract are government finances and policy outcomes different under politicians with business experience we study california city councils and implement a regression discontinuity strategy to provide causal evidence on this issue ultimately we find no evidence that the election of a candidate with business experience impacts city expenditures revenues unemployment rates and other outcomes future vote shares for candidates with business experience are also unaffected which suggests that these politicians are not having an impact that is observed to voters but unobserved in our data

give everyone a prize employee stock options in private venture backed firms this study examines employee stock options in private entrepreneurial companies i focus on private u s venture backed firms because they are renowned for the intensity and organizational depth of their stock option grants contrary to simple stereotype however i show that 27 of u s venture backed firms do not grant stock options to all employees i seek to explain this by theorizing that the economic and legal settings in which venture backed companies exist lead to both costs and benefits from the use of stock options to attract compensate incent monitor and retain certain employees and that sometimes the costs exceed the benefits i test the theory by determining whether variation in the organizational depth to which venture backed firms grant employee stock options can be explained by proxies for these economic and legal costs such proxies include the fraction of employees who are in technical positions the degree of flatness in the firm s organizational structure its proximity to other venture backed companies the number of patents it has been granted and the fraction of equity held by venture investors the results support the theory and thereby imply that venture backed firms grant employee stock options in an economically sophisticated manner

political preferences for the pork barrel a generalization this paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions often approaching unanimous size in the realm of distributive policies distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas states congressional districts while spreading costs through general taxation the explanation offered here that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to hard ball coalition politics generalizes earlier work of weingast and fiorina in particular it extends their results to pork barrel politics i e projects that are economically inefficient and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular the main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and consequently the desire for the political insurance that universalism provides

efficient and nearly efficient partnerships this paper shows in two ways that the degree to which free riding diminishes the performance of deterministic partnerships may be less than has been generally thought first a necessary and sufficient condition is provided for a partnership to sustain full efficiency it implies that many non trivial partnerships sustain efficiency such as generic ones with finite action spaces and neoclassical ones with leontief technologies second approximate efficiency is shown to be achievable in a large class of partnerships including ones with smooth and monotonic production and disutility functions approximate efficiency is achieved by mixed strategy equilibria one partner takes with small probability an inefficient action the degree to which efficiency is approximated is restricted only by the amount of liability the partners can bear nonetheless their equilibrium payments are not arbitrarily large

sticks or carrots optimal ceo compensation when managers are loss averse this paper analyzes optimal executive compensation contracts when managers are loss averse we calibrate a stylized principal agent model to the observed contracts of 595 ceos and show that this model can explain observed option holdings and high base salaries remarkably well for a range of parameterizations we also derive and calibrate the general shape of the optimal contract that is increasing and convex for medium and high outcomes and that drops discontinuously to the lowest possible payout for low outcomes finally we identify the critical features of the loss aversion model that render optimal contracts convex

exposing corrupt politicians the effects of brazil s publicly released audits on electoral outcomes author s finan frederico ferraz claudio abstract this paper examines the extent to which access to information enhances political accountability based upon the results of brazil s recent anti corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally transferred funds it estimates the effect of the disclosure of local government corruption practices upon the re election success of incumbent mayors in municipal elections comparing municipalities which were randomly audited before the elections with those audited after the analysis shows that the disclosure of audit results had a significant impact on the re election rates of mayors found to be corrupt for a one standard deviation increase in reported corruption the audit policy reduced the incumbent s likelihood of re election by 25 percent this effect is more pronounced in municipalities where radio stations are present and higher levels of corruption are identified these findings highlight the value of information and the role of the media in reducing informational asymmetries in the political process thus enabling voters to not only hold corrupt politicians accountable but also to reward non corrupt politicians

a positive theory of fiscal deficits and government debt this paper considers an economy in which policymakers with different preferences alternate in office as a result of elections government debt is used strategically by each policymaker to influence the choices of his successors if different policymakers disagree about the desired composition of government spending between two public goods the economy exhibits a deficits bias that is debt accumulation is higher than it would be with a social planner the equilibrium level of debt is larger the larger is the degree of polarization between alternating governments and the less likely it is that the current government will be re elected

the effect of implicit contracts on the movement of wages over the business cycle evidence from micro data in this paper we address the question of whether wages are affected by labor market conditions in a manner more consistent with a contract approach than with a standard spot market model from a simple implicit contract model we derive implications about the links between wages and past labor market conditions using individual data from the current population survey and the panel study of income dynamics we find that an implicit contract model with costless mobility describes these links better than either a simple spot market model or an implicit contract model with costly mobility

nonlinear pricing with random participation the canonical selection contracting programme takes the agent s participation decision as deterministic and finds the optimal contract typically satisfying this constraint for the worst type upon weakening this assumption of known reservation values by introducing independent randomness into the agents outside options we find that some of the received wisdom from mechanism design and nonlinear pricing is not robust and the richer model which allows for stochastic participation affords a more general empirical specification we develop a multidimensional methodology for addressing this class of problems providing two important applications to nonlinear pricing first with nonlinear pricing by a monopolist the familiar nodistortion at the top result persists but in tandem with the surprising conclusion that there is either no distortion at the bottom or bunching second in a simple model of product differentiated duopolists competing with nonlinear pricing we show that generally the duopoly outcome is qualitatively similar to the monopoly outcome however when marginal costs are symmetric and competition is sufficiently intense distortions disappear and the equilibrium outcome takes a remarkably simple form efficient quality allocations with cost plus fee pricing

an empirical model of wage indexation provisions in union contracts this paper describes the responses of index linked wage rates to concurrent price increases for a sample of canadian union contracts and then analyzes theseresponses in terms of a simple model of indexation to the aggregate price level the model highlights the importance of aggregate price movements in conveying information about industry specific prices the empirical analysis confirms that industry specific correlations between input and output prices and the consumer price index are important determinants of the flexibility of wages to prices across indexed contracts

market valuation of employee stock options this study investigates whether investors incorporate the value of a firm s outstanding employee stock options into its stock price i estimate the outstanding options value for a sample of firms for which outstanding fixed options exceed 5 of outstanding common shares in 1988 i find a negative correlation between the value of outstanding options and a firm s share price the correlation is stronger i for the option s intrinsic value than for the option s time value ii for options that are later in their vesting stage than earlier in their vesting stage and iii for large firms than for small firms in addition the fasb s method for calculating compensation expense has no explanatory power in the presence of this paper s calculation of the options value

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

politicians bureaucrats and targeted redistribution abstract the paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats it uses the example of patronage jobs in the u s local governments to provide empirical support for this claim it shows that the number of public employees is higher for elected chief executives this difference is stronger in public services with bigger private public wage differential and it increases during election years it also finds that the number of public employees increases with the age of bureaucrats while there is no such relationship in the case of politicians which is consistent with younger bureaucrats having stronger career concerns

is antitrust too complicated for generalist judges the impact of economic complexity and judicial training on appeals abstractthe recent increase in the demand for expert economic analysis in antitrust litigation has improved the welfare of economists however the law and economics literature is silent on the effects of economic complexity or judges economic training on judicial decision making we use a unique data set on antitrust litigation in federal district and administrative courts during 1996 2006 to examine whether economic complexity impacts antitrust decisions and provide a novel test of the hypothesis that antitrust analysis has become too complex for generalist judges we also examine the impact of basic economic training on judges we find that decisions involving the evaluation of complex economic evidence are significantly more likely to be appealed and decisions of judges trained in basic economics are significantly less likely to be appealed than are decisions by their untrained counterparts our analysis supports the hypothesis that some antitrust cases are too complicated for generalist judges

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

do elected leaders in a limited democracy have real power evidence from rural china abstract do elected leaders in an authoritarian regime have any real power does grassroots democracy in a one party state entail parochial problems making use of primary survey data covering two election cycles in a mountainous area of china where an administrative village consists of several natural villages nvs we find that elected village heads favor their home nvs in resource allocations especially when these nvs have a large population in contrast the home nvs of appointed communist party secretaries do not receive disproportionately more resources on average this pattern of resource allocation is compatible with the interest of village heads and suggests that as elected leaders village heads have some true power in resource distribution

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

why do firms use incentives that have no incentive effects this paper illustrates why firms might choose to implement stock option plans or other pay instruments that reward luck i consider a model where adjusting compensation contracts is costly and where employees outside opportunities are correlated with their firms performance the model may help to explain the use and recent rise of broad based stock option plans as well as other financial instruments even when these pay plans have no effect on employees on the job behavior the model suggests that agency theory s often overlooked participation constraint may be an important determinant of some common compensation schemes particularly for employees below the highest executive ranks many compensation plans reward or punish employees for factors they cannot control an often discussed example of this phenomenon is executive compensation where stock options are not generally indexed to the overall market however many firms also offer firm wide stock options and profit sharing plans that provide even weaker incentives than executive plans after all most workers can expect to reap trivial personal gain from their contribution to firm value or profits i consider an explanation for this phenomenon in which firms contract with employees as a means of indexing wages to market rates rather than to provide incentives while much of the agency literature has concentrated on inducing optimal effort i consider the importance of the generally overlooked participation constraint i study a model in which employees outside opportunities are correlated with firm profits or stock price and in which both turnover and adjusting the pay scheme parameters are costly given these assumptions the firm may find it most profitable to pay the employee in a way that is correlated with the outside options presented by the outside labor market despite the requisite risk premium rather than pay a fixed wage that insures participation in all states the model derived below starts from the assumption that wage adjustments are costly but that workers are willing to make part of their pay contingent

an opposing responses test of classic versus market based promotion tournaments we use a systems based econometric method to show that classic and market based tournament models are empirically distinguishable since the role of risk differs across these models implementing the method using a large finnish worker firm matched panel we find support for classic tournaments given that promotions depend on relative performance the firm s wage structure is convex promotion probabilities are decreasing in the number of competitors performance is increasing in the wage spread and workers and firms adjust their choice variables in opposite directions when the variance of the stochastic component of worker performance changes

fiscal consequences of electoral institutions abstract there are more than 500 000 elected local government officials in the united states the most electorally dense county has more than 20 times the average number of elected officials per capita this paper offers the first systematic investigation of the link between electoral density and fiscal outcomes electoral density presents a tradeoff between accountability and monitoring costs increasing the number of specialized elected offices promotes issue unbundling reducing slack between citizen preferences and government policy but the costs of monitoring a larger number of officials may offset these benefits producing greater latitude for politicians to pursue their own goals at the expense of citizen interests we predict diminishing returns to electoral density and a documentclass aastex usepackage amsbsy usepackage amsfonts usepackage amssymb usepackage bm usepackage mathrsfs usepackage pifont usepackage stmaryrd usepackage textcomp usepackage portland xspace usepackage

salaries plea rates and the career objectives of federal prosecutors abstract we examine the relation between local labor markets and the behavior of federal prosecutors empirical evidence is provided that assistant u s attorneys in districts with high private salaries are more likely to take cases to trial than are assistants in districts with low private salaries we explain this finding as follows in high salary districts government salaries are not competitive relative to the private sector therefore federal prosecutor positions are sought by individuals who want the trial experience needed to secure desired private sector employment the following additional evidence further supports this explanation first the turnover of assistant u s attorneys is higher in high private salary districts than in low private salary districts second individuals who leave their employment as assistant u s attorneys are of higher quality in districts with higher private lawyer salaries third assistant u s attorneys with more trial experience are more likely to take position

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

paying for observable luck this article examines why ceos are rewarded for luck namely for observable shocks beyond their control i propose a simple hidden action model where the agent has implicit incentives to avoid bankruptcy after signing the contract but before acting the agent observes a signal on future luck implicit incentives are weaker after good news and call for higher pay for performance sensitivity in good times as a result managerial pay is tied to luck the model is also consistent with recent evidence of asymmetric pay for luck that is a larger exposure of managerial pay to good luck than to bad

bureaucrats or politicians part i a single policy task this paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat the bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort or if there is great uncertainty about whether the policymaker has the required abilities the optimal allocation of redistributive tasks is ambiguous and depends on how the bureaucrat can be instructed but irrespective of the normative conclusion the politician prefers not to delegate redistributive policies

determinants of the introduction of stock options by japanese firms analysis from the incentive and selection perspectives this paper examines the determinants of the introduction of stock options in japan in response to their deregulation from the incentive and selection perspectives younger firms use broad based stock options more often even after controlling firm size growth and the possibility of a liquidity constraint moreover stock price volatility increases the adoption of stock options only when a firm is young these results support the relevancy of a selection view that focuses on efficient project choice stock options are used more often by fast growing firms and less in regulated industries and by the firms with concentrated ownership structure consistent with both views

using revenue sharing to implement flexible prices evidence from movie exhibition contracts movie exhibition contracts entail revenue sharing terms that go down with weeks since release we develop a simple model to show how the form of these contracts can be explained by the distributors desire to set flexible prices we then use detailed data on theater movie contracts in spain where we exploit the information available at the time of contracting for movies previously released in the u s and other movie and theater characteristics to show how the implications of our flexible pricing argument are supported in the data and differentiate our explanation from prior more standard risk sharing and moral hazard explanations

endogenously chosen boards of directors and their monitoring of the ceo author s hermalin benjamin e abstract this paper develops a model in which the effectiveness of a board s monitoring of the ceo depends on the board s independence the independence of new directors is determined through negotiations implicit or explicit between the existing directors and the ceo the ceo s bargaining position and thus influence over the board selection process depends on an updated estimate of the ceo s ability based on prior performance many empirical findings about board structure and performance arise as equilibrium phenomena in this model we also explore the implications of this model for proposed regulations of corporate governance structures please contact the program in law and economics at boalt hall school of law uc berkeley berkeley ca 94720 for a copy of this paper

reviving leviathan fiscal federalism and the growth of government this article revisits the influential leviathan hypothesis which pos its that tax competition limits the growth of government spending in decentralized countries i use panel data to examine the effect of fiscal decentralization over time within countries attempting to distinguish between decentralization that is funded by intergovernmental transfers and local taxation first i explore the logic whereby decentralization should restrict government spending if state and local governments have wide ranging authority to set the tax base and rate especially on mobile assets in countries where this is most clearly the case decentralization is associated with smaller government second consistent with theoretical arguments drawn from wel fare economics and positive political economy i show that governments grow faster as they fund a greater portion of public expenditures through intergovernmental transfers

constitutions politics and economics a review essay on persson and tabellini s the economic effects of constitutions in this essay i review the new book by torsten persson and guido tabellini the economic effects of constitutions which investigates the policy and economic consequences of different forms of government and electoral rules i also take advantage of this opportunity to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a number of popular empirical strategies in the newly emerging field of comparative political economy

employee stock option exercises an empirical analysis this paper describes the exercise behavior of over 50 000 employees who hold longterm options on employer stock at eight corporations employees typically exercise options years before expiration commonly sacrificing half of the black scholes value exercise is strongly associated with recent stock price movements the market to strike ratio proximity to vesting dates time to maturity volatility and the employee s level within the company these findings have implications for compensation planners the fasb as it develops a new accounting standard for options and financial statement users and preparers who apply and interpret the new fasb standard

the contemporary relevance of a cambridge tradition economics as political economy political economy as social theory and ethical theory in this review essay i set out key aspects of nuno martins the cambridge revival of political economy in so doing i also provide some comments on the current state of economics since these provide some context for an appreciation of what martins is trying to achieve martins is focused on making the positive case for classical political economy cpe as a form of theory that is quite different from the modern mainstream for martins that difference is based on its approach to the distribution of a surplus expressed through a social ontology that is based on historical open systems and in which the key aspect of open systems is the institutional and hence deliberative activity by which the surplus is decided which is ultimately an issue for ethics it is through a cambridge tradition focusing on sraffa keynes lawson and sen that cpe a classical social theory and ethical deliberation are brought together bringing them together is an act of synthesis and i conclude by providing a constructive critique of the terms of this synthesis

managerial legacies entrenchment and strategic inertia this paper argues that the legacy potential of a firm s strategy is an important deter minant of ceo compensation turnover and strategy change a legacy makes ceo replacement expensive because firm performance can only partially be attributed to a newly employed manager boards may therefore optimally allow an incumbent to be entrenched moreover when a firm changes strategy it is optimal to change the ceo because the incumbent has a vested interest in seeing the new strategy fail even though ceos have no specific skills in our model legacy issues can explain the empirical association between ceo and strategy change this paper proposes a model of ceo replacement and puts forward a novel determinant for turnover decisions the legacy potential of a firm s strategy we mean by this the extent to which a manager s decisions affect future firm cash flows potentially beyond the manager s own tenure the replacement of a ceo is arguably one of the most important decisions a firm takes yet the theoretical and empirical finance literature has relatively little to say about the firm and manager specific characteristics that lead to one manager being fired and replaced by another as brickley 2003 points out the only variable that predicts turnover empirically is poor firm performance but it has little pre dictive power theoretical papers on managerial turnover tend to reduce ceo successions to a sequence of static interactions see below for more details as such they do not distinguish between a ceo who is hired and can start a fresh project or one who is constrained in this choice because he inherits a prede cessor s long term strategy our paper focuses on this latter phenomenon and investigates turnover decisions when strategy choices have a legacy potential the fact that a dynamic link exists between a ceo and his predecessor is probably more recognized in the accounting literature than in finance pourciau both authors are from the toulouse school of economics and the institut d administration des

probability weighting and employee stock options this paper documents that riskier firms with higher idiosyncratic volatility grant more stock options to nonexecutive employees standard models in the literature cannot easily explain this pattern a model in which a risk neutral firm and an employee with prospect theory preferences bargain over the employee s pay package can the key feature which makes stock options attractive is probability weighting the model fits the data on option grants well when calibrated using standard parameters from the experimental literature the results are the first evidence that risky firms can profitably use stock options to cater to an employee demand for long shot bets

a history of post keynesian economics john king in his a history of post keynesian economics since 1936 raises the question of whether there exists a body of work which can be called collectively post keynesian this paper presents some criteria for addressing this question beginning with the vision and the origins of some of the post keynesian ideas leading to an examination of certain features of the various groups including their methodology and their approaches to uncertainty their pricing theories and their growth theories it is concluded that although there is much diversity in the various groups they are reconcilable when seen as referring to different aspects of the economic process and at differing levels of abstraction copyright 2005 oxford university press

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

studying the role of political competition in the evolution of government size over long horizons here we argue for the use of cointegration and error correction analysis to combine economic factors that are nonstationary with political factors that are stationary into an empirical model of the evolution of public policy over long periods the approach is applied to disentangle the contributions of economics and politics to the evolution of public expenditure by the government of canada over 130 years political competition emerges as the primary political factor affecting government size

worker investments in safety workplace accidents and compensating wage differentials the theory of compensating wage differentials cwds assumes that firms supply and workers demand workplace safety predicting a positive relationship between accident risk and wages this article allows for safety provision by workers which predicts a countervailing negative relationship between individual risk and wages firms pay higher wages for higher safety related productivity using national longitudinal survey of youth panel data and data on fatal and nonfatal accidents our precise cwds imply a value of a statistical injury of 45 4 thousand and a value of a statistical life of 6 3 million in line with our model individual risk and wages are negatively correlated

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

returns to talent and the finance wage premium to study the role of talent in finance workers pay we exploit a special feature of the french higher education system wage returns to talent have been significantly higher and have risen faster since the 1980s in finance than in other sectors both wage returns to project size and the elasticity of project size to talent are also higher in this industry last the share of performance pay varies more for talent in finance these findings are supportive of finance wages reflecting the competitive assignment of talent in an industry that exhibits a high complementarity between talent and scale received october 11 2017 editorial decision september 4 2018 by editor stijn van nieuwerburgh authors have furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

optimal strike prices of stock options for effort averse executives abstract this paper evaluates the common practice of setting the strike prices of executive option plans at the money hall and murphy hall brian murphy kevin j 2000 optimal exercise prices for executive stock options american economic review 90 2 209 214 claim this practice to be optimal since it maximizes the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance however they do not incorporate effort and the possibility that managers are effort averse into their model we revisit this question while explicitly introducing these factors and allowing the reward package to include fixed wages options and stock grants we simulate the manager s effort choice and compensation as well as the value of shareholders equity under alternative compensation schemes and identify schemes that are optimal our simulations indicate that when abstracting from tax considerations it is optimal to award managers with options that will most likely be highly valuable i e substantially in the money on their expiration date prior to 2006 the tax code and financial reporting standards provided incentives to award options that are closer to the money when issued than the options that were optimal in the absence of these considerations recent tax and reporting changes voided these incentives and thus we predict that these changes will induce firms to issue options with lower strike prices than those that were issued prior to 2006

elected versus appointed policymakers evidence from city treasurers abstract this paper investigates whether the method of selecting public officials affects policy making i compare the policy choices of bureaucrat city treasurers and politician city treasurers who are selected and held accountable in very different ways the analysis draws on rich data from california to examine whether cities with appointed or elected city treasurers pay lower costs to borrow the results demonstrate that having appointive treasurers reduces a city s cost of borrowing by 19 31 percent holding officials directly accountable to voters can result in lower levels of performance in complex policy areas

the timing of discretionary bonuses effort signals and reciprocity abstract in a real effort experiment we investigate the relationship between reciprocity and the timing of discretionary bonuses in a two period principal agent manager worker setting we vary the timing of the manager s bonus decision in order to examine two main channels reward and trust through which discretionary bonuses may operate average worker performance improves when bonus decisions are made between the two periods since both channels are simultaneously active first period output significantly increases as workers attempt to signal their trustworthiness to managers when the bonus decision is made upfront or at the end average output is no different than in a baseline setting without the bonus mechanism furthermore output after a bonus is not paid decreases substantially consistent with negative reciprocity our main findings are reinforced by using time spent on the available real leisure activity as an alternative measure of subjects effort

hierarchical accountability in government abstract this paper studies a setting where a relatively uninformed voter holds a policymaker accountable through an informed intermediary in equilibrium the voter uses the intermediary to insulate the policymaker from pandering incentives when the voter s policy expertise is low or the policymaker s congruence is high the voter can thus enjoy the benefits of bureaucratic expertise without forfeiting electoral responsiveness we examine the model s predictions using u s city level data and find that hierarchically accountable managers reduce popular city employment and adjust it more flexibly than electorally accountable mayors the estimated incentive effects are smaller in cities with high voter expertise and larger during election years and are robust to instrumentation by precipitation shocks that influenced early 20th century manager government adoptions for reasons obsolete today

diversity and redistribution abstract in this paper we analyze the interaction of income and preference heterogeneity in a political economy framework we ask whether the presence of preference heterogeneity arising for example from different ethnic groups or geographic locations affects the ability of the poor to extract resources from the rich we study the equilibrium of a game in which coalitions of individuals form parties parties propose platforms and all individuals vote with the winning policy chosen by plurality political parties are restricted to offering platforms that are credible in that they belong to the pareto set of their members the platforms specify the values of two policy tools a general redistributive tax which is lump sum rebated or used to fund a general public good and a series of taxes whose revenue is used to fund specific targeted goods tailored to particular preferences or localities our analysis demonstrates that taste conflict first dilutes but later reinforces class interests when the degree of taste diversity is low the equilibrium policy is characterized by some amount of general income redistribution and some targeted transfers as taste diversity increases in society the set of equilibrium policies becomes more and more tilted towards special interest groups and against general redistribution as diversity increases further however the only policy that can emerge supports exclusively general redistribution

tax contracts and elections in this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections policies and welfare we consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government and voters may behave strategically parties have policy preferences about the level of public good provision and benefit from perks when in office a government raises taxes for both purposes we show that tax contracts yield moderate policies and lead to lower perks by avoiding the formation of grand coalitions in order to win government moreover in polarized societies they unambiguously improve the welfare of the median voter

rent sharing before and after the wage bill many biases plague the analysis of whether employers share rents with their employees unlike what is predicted by the competitive labour market model using a portuguese matched employer employee panel this article is one of the first to address these biases in three complementary ways 1 controlling directly for the fact that firms that share more rents will ceteris paribus have lower net of wages profits 2 instrumenting profits via interactions between the exchange rate and the share of exports in firm s total sales 3 considering firm or firm worker spell fixed effects and highlighting the role of downward wage rigidity these approaches clarify conflicting findings in the literature and result in our preferred specifications in significant evidence of rent sharing a lester range of pay dispersion of 56 also shown to be robust to a number of competitive interpretations

the effects of employee stock option plans on operating performance in chinese firms abstract as a part of the ongoing liberalization of the marketplace chinese regulators adopted the guideline called regulation of equity incentive plans trial to allow firms to provide employee incentives through employee stock option plans firms began initiating the plans in 2006 we investigate the impact of these plans on firm performance by comparing option award firms with similar non award matching firms the change in roe for the option award firms is significantly higher than the matching firms this is primarily due to their performance holding up better during the global financial crisis while the matching firms performance deteriorates the stock price of these firms shows a positive reaction to the announcement but no long term abnormal returns the better roe performance for option award firms is strong for subsets of the sample that are likely to benefit more from incentivized employees specifically privately owned firms firms with higher board independence and smaller firms after various robustness tests we conclude that the higher performance comes from the employee incentives rather than earnings manipulation a replacement of cash compensation a binding of employees to executives or gaming vesting periods

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