We examine the stock option exercise decisions of over 50,000 employees at seven corporations to provide evidence on the distribution of price-relevant non-public information among employees. When option exercise (adjusted for other factors affecting exercise) is low, stock returns in the coming 6 months are 10% higher than when option exercise is high. The exercise decisions of relatively juni...

We analyze the following questions under imperfect labour markets. How does strategic outsourcing influence wage formation, profit sharing and employee effort when firms commit to optimal profit sharing before wage formation or decide for profit sharing after wage formation? What is the relationship between outsourcing, profit sharing, and equilibrium unemployment? We find that in both scenario...

Conventional wisdom suggests that CEO membership of the compensation committee is an open invitation to rent extraction by self-serving executives. However, using data from New Zealand – where CEO compensation committee membership is relatively common – we find that annual pay increments for CEOs with this apparent advantage averaged six percentage points less than those enjoyed by other CEOs d...

This paper incorporates morale into a standard principal-agent model. When morale is observable, the agent’s effort level, the optimal piece rate, and the firm’s expected profits are all increasing in the worker’s level of morale. However, when morale is unobservable, workers shirk relative to the full information solution. The paper also considers a model of morale interdependence. The results...

This paper explores how much firm-paid employee benefits and firms’ financial conditions have contributed to delayed employment recoveries relative to output since 1990, using a DSGE model. Empirically, I document the underexplored pro-cyclicality of per worker benefit costs. Post-1990 period differs from before in that: (1) there have been larger increases of such quasifixed employment costs a...

We introduce explicitly the effort as a choice variable in a continuous time utility maximisation framework of an executive who is partly compensated with stock options. We solve the model in the case where the executive is not allowed to trade in the company’s stock but is able to achieve a partial insurance through trading in a correlated market portfolio. We define the executive’s value of t...

The practice of resetting strike prices on underwater executive stock options has drawn criticism for weakening managerial incentives. Our model shows that although the anticipation of resetting can negatively a!ect initial incentives, resetting can still be an important, value-enhancing aspect of compensation contracts, even from an ex-ante standpoint. In fact, we "nd that some resetting is al...

We define annual shareholder meetings as contentious if one or more ballot items are likely to obtain sufficient shareholder votes to induce a firm to implement governance changes. Using a sample of almost 28,000 meetings between 2003 and 2012, we find that abnormal stock returns over the 40-day period prior to contentious meetings are significantly positive and higher than prior to non-content...

We generate estimates of the costs of broad-based stock option programs under varying assumptions about why firms use these pay schemes. We show that, if accounting considerations alone drive option grants, a typical firm in our sample incurs between 50 cents and one dollar of real costs in order to increase reported pre-tax net income by $1. This cost is reduced, but is still quite substantial...

This paper examines the effects of performance incentives in a federal job training program for the economically disadvantaged. A natural experiment that exogenously varies the incentives that government workers face allows me to identify incentive responses, which I find are consistent with a simple model of organizational behavior. Additionally, I show that the program’s incentive designers h...