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Journal Article
Issues in corporate governance
On September 29, 2002, William J. McDonough, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, delivered the William Taylor Memorial Lecture in Washington, D.C., at an event cosponsored by the William Taylor Memorial Fund and the Group of Thirty, a private, international consultative group on economic and monetary affairs. In his lecture, Mr. McDonough describes the actions already taken by private and public sector groups to strengthen corporate governance and accounting standards and identifies areas where reforms are still needed.
Newsletter
Executive compensation and market risks
Some U.S. taxpayers were angry and felt betrayed when financial company executives received large bonuses in the midst of the 2008-09 financial crisis. These executives headed some of the same firms whose risky practices contributed to the crisis?and then later received billions of dollars in government bailouts. Who makes the changes in executive compensation policies and regulations to avoid such risks in the future? Read the February 2010 Newsletter for answers and interesting insights.
Working Paper
Executive compensation at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Corporate governance-and executive-compensation arrangements in particular-should be an important component of the agenda to reform the housing GSEs. The GSEs' safety-and-soundness regulator-who is essentially the debtholders' and taxpayers' representative-must be admitted to the GSEs' boardroom in a way that is atypical of an ordinary publicly held company. This intrusion into the board's oversight of executive-compensation plans is justified given the GSEs' public purposes and their large potential cost to taxpayers. Prudent public policy requires greater supervisory control over executive ...
Speech
Still more lessons from the crisis
Remarks at the Foreign Policy Association Corporate Dinner, New York City
Working Paper
Executive compensation: a new view from a long-term perspective, 1936-2005
We analyze the long-run trends in executive compensation using a new panel dataset of top executives in large firms from 1936 to 2005. In sharp contrast to the well-known steep upward trajectory of pay of the past 30 years, the median real value of compensation was remarkably flat from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, highlighting a weak relationship between compensation and aggregate firm size. While this correlation has changed considerably over the century, the cross-sectional relationship between pay and firm size has remained stable. Another surprising finding is that the sensitivity of ...
Journal Article
Incentive features in CEO compensation in the banking industry
This article examines the incentive features of top-management compensation in the banking industry. Economic theory suggests that the compensation structures for bank management should have low pay-performance sensitivity because of the high leverage of banks and the fact that banks are regulated institutions. In accordance with this school of thought, the authors find that the pay-performance sensitivity for bank CEOs is lower than it is for CEOs of manufacturing firms. This difference is attributable largely to the difference in debt ratios. The authors also find that banks' ...
Journal Article
Policy update: Are CEOs paid too much?
Related link(s): https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2009/spring/policy_update_weblinks.cfm
Working Paper
Executive compensation: a calibration approach
A study that uses principal-agent theory to produce quantitative predictions about executive compensation, showing that observed incentives closely match optimal predicted incentives.
Journal Article
Firms, assignments, and earnings
Conference Paper
CEO incentives and earnings management