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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 ...
Journal Article
Regulation and the composition of CEO pay
A look at the recent trends in the use of grants of restricted stocks and options in the compensation packages of chief executive officers (CEOs) of large, public U.S. companies reveals that there have been important changes. These changes coincide with the introduction of two new regulations: the modifications of reporting requirements for option grants introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, and the adoption in 2006 of revised accounting standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) included in statement no. 123R (FAS 123R), which mandated the expensing of option ...
Journal Article
Hidden effort, learning by doing, and wage dynamics
Many occupations are subject to learning by doing: Effort at the workplace early in the career of a worker results in higher productivity later on. In such occupations, if effort at work is unobservable, a moral hazard problem also arises. We study a particular specification of learning by doing in which the conditional distribution of output depends on the sum of undepreciated efforts. With this specification, we can overcome the technical difficulties for solving for the optimal contract that arise because of the persistent effects of effort in time. Our numerical example shows that effort ...
Briefing
Measuring CEO Compensation
Compensation packages for CEOs of large public companies often include grants of restricted stock and stock options, the value of which to the CEO depends on the future performance of the firm, as well as on the terms of the grants. This value, which is key to evaluating the CEO's incentives, can be estimated in a number of ways. The authors use measures based on the expected values and the realized values of pay to compare the compensation of CEOs in a sample of large public U.S. firms and a subset of financial firms before and after the 2007-08 financial crisis.
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 ...
Briefing
Bank Resolution and the Fed’s New Standing Repo Facility
In July 2021, the Fed put a new lending program in place: the Standing Repo Facility. The program will likely impact the financial system in multiple ways. One specific area of influence is the process of resolution planning at large banking corporations. How the facility interacts with those plans will depend in part on guidance provided by regulators as resolution planning continues evolving.
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
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
Moral hazard and persistence
We study a multiperiod principal-agent problem with moral hazard in which effort is persistent: the agent is required to exert effort only in the initial period of the contract, and this effort determines the conditional distribution of output in the following periods. We provide a characterization of the optimal dynamic compensation scheme. As in a static moral hazard problem, consumption ? regardless of time period ? is ranked according to likelihood ratios of output histories. As in most dynamic models with asymmetric information, the inverse of the marginal utility of consumption ...