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Working Paper
Banker Compensation, Relative Performance, and Bank Risk
A multi-agent, moral-hazard model of a bank operating under deposit insurance and limited liability is used to analyze the connection between compensation of bank employees (below CEO) and bank risk. Limited liability with deposit insurance is a force that distorts effort down. However, the need to increase compensation to risk-averse employees in order to compensate them for extra bank risk is a force that reduces this effect. Optimal contracts use relative performance and are implementable as a wage with bonuses tied to individual and firm performance. The connection between pay for ...
Briefing
Bank Lending in the Time of COVID
We discuss the evolution of bank lending during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Large domestic banks and foreign-related banks increased significantly their lending to businesses during these months, much of it through existing lines of credit. Small domestic banks played an active role in providing paycheck protection loans. In terms of consumer credit, the stock of banks' residential mortgage loans did not change substantially, and the amount of bank credit flowing directly to consumers decreased.
Working Paper
The Complexity of CEO Compensation
I study firm characteristics that justify the use of options or refresher grants in the optimal compensation packages for CEOs in the presence of moral hazard. I model explicitly the determination of stock prices as a function of the output realizations of the firm: Symmetric learning by all parties about the exogenous quality of the firm makes stock prices sensitive to output observations. Compensation packages are designed to transform this sensitivity of prices-to-output into the sensitivity of consumption-to-output that is dictated by the optimal contract. Heterogeneity in the structure ...
Briefing
Assessing Large Financial Firm Resolvability
A large financial institution may be said to be "resolvable" if, in the event of failure, policymakers would allow it to go through bankruptcy without financial assistance from the government. The choice between bankruptcy or bailout trades off different sets of costs on the economy. This Economic Brief presents a new tool that could assist policymakers with this evaluation, potentially helping to curb the "too big to fail" problem, serving as a useful complement to the "living wills" process, and making the resolution process more transparent.
Working Paper
Repeated moral hazard with effort persistence
I study a problem of repeated moral hazard in which the effect of effort is persistent over time: each period's outcome distribution is a function of a geometrically distributed lag of past efforts. I show that when the utility of the agent is linear in effort, a simple rearrangement of terms in his lifetime utility translates this problem into a related standard repeated moral hazard. The solutions for consumption in the two problems are observationally equivalent, implying that the main properties of the optimal contract remain unchanged with persistence. To illustrate, I present the ...
Journal Article
Evaluating Executive Compensation Packages
The first step in understanding the incentives provided to chief executive officers (CEOs) of large public firms is to measure their compensation accurately. This is not a straightforward task, as only partial information on compensation contracts is collected systematically (Execucomp, since 1992, for top executives of public U.S. firms). The source for the information is the compensation summary tables that the Securities and Exchange Commission mandates to be included in annual proxy statements. We show how to use this available data, together with stock price data in the Center for ...
Journal Article
Gender Composition of the Boards of Directors of the Regional Federal Reserve Banks
Women have traditionally been underrepresented among governors of the Federal Reserve Board and among presidents of the regional Federal Reserve Banks. This lack of diversity may limit the representation of the interests of women, leave out valuable talent, and affect group dynamics and decision-making. These concerns are also relevant for the members of the Boards of Directors of the twelve regional banks of the Federal Reserve System. This article presents and analyzes hand-collected data on female representation on these twelve boards. Since 1977, when the first five women began serving as ...
Briefing
Living Wills for Systemically Important Financial Institutions: Some Expected Benefits and Challenges
The Dodd-Frank Act requires systemically important financial institutions to create resolution plans, or living wills, that bankruptcy courts can follow if these institutions fall into severe financial distress. The plans must set out a path for resolution without public bailouts and with minimal disruption to the financial system. While living wills can, in this way, help to curb the "too big to fail" problem, regulators face a number of challenges in achieving this goal. The authority granted to regulators by the Act, including the power to make systemically important institutions change ...
Journal Article
CEO compensation : trends, market changes, and regulation
The average pay of a chief executive officer (CEO) in a top U.S. firm has increased six-fold in the last three decades. Simultaneously, the composition of pay has moved away from salary-based and increasingly toward performance-based compensation in the form of stock grants and stock option grants. This has strengthened the link between CEO pay and firm performance. Anecdotal evidence on the recent corporate fraud scandals suggests that some incentive problems remain unsolved. However, the academic literature reviewed in this article concludes that changes in market characteristics and the ...
Working Paper
On the Measurement of Large Financial Firm Resolvability
We say that a large financial institution is "resolvable" if policymakers would allow it to go through unassisted bankruptcy in the event of failure. The choice between bankruptcy or bailout trades off the higher loss imposed on the economy in a potentially disruptive resolution against the incentive for excessive risk-taking created by an assisted resolution or a bailout. The resolution plans ("living wills") of large financial institutions contain information needed to evaluate this trade-off. In this paper, we propose a tool to complement the living will review process: an impact score ...