Title: Matching firms, managers and incentives
Description: "We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources and survey data to study the match between firms and managers.  The data includes manager characteristics, such as risk aversion and talent; firm characteristics, such as ownership; detailed measures of managerial practices relative to incentives, dismissals and promotions; and measurable outcomes, for the firm and for the manager.  A parsimonious model of matching and incentive provision generates an array of implications that can be tested with our data.  Our contribution is twofold.  We disentangle the role of risk-aversion and talent in determining how firms select and motivate managers.  In particular, risk-averse managers are matched with firms that offer low-powered contracts.  We also show that empirical findings linking governance, incentives, and performance that are typically observed in isolation, can instead be interpreted within a simple unified matching framework"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.