[This article studies a continuous time principal-agent problem of a firm whose cash flows are determined by the manager's unobserved effort. The firm's cash flows are further subject to persistent and publicly observable shocks that are beyond the manager's control. While standard contracting models predict that compensation should optimally filter out these shocks, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. In line with this evidence, our model predicts that the manager is "rewarded for luck."]

This paper looks at the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008–9. A first important finding is that the large employment swings in the construction sector linked to the boom and bust in US housing markets is an important factor behind the different labor market performances of the three countries. We also find that cross-country differences among OECD countries are consistent with a conventional Okun relationship linking gross domestic product growth to employment performance.

We study non-contractible intangible investment in a dynamic agency model with multitasking. The manager’s short-term task determines current performance, which deteriorates with investment in the firm’s future profitability, his long-term task. The optimal contract dynamically balances incentives for short- and long-term performance. Investment is distorted upwards (downwards) relative to first-best in firms with high (low) returns to investment. These distortions decrease as good performance relaxes endogenous financial constraints, implying negative (positive) investment-cash flow sensitivities. Our results shed light on how corporate investment policies, liquidity management, and executive compensation structure differ across industries with different returns to intangible investment.

This article studies a continuous time principal-agent problem of a firm whose cash flows are determined by the manager's unobserved effort. The firm's cash flows are further subject to persistent and publicly observable shocks that are beyond the manager's control. While standard contracting models predict that compensation should optimally filter out these shocks, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. In line with this evidence, our model predicts that the manager is “rewarded for luck.”

This paper analyzes the importance of teacher quality at the college level. Instructors are matched to objective and subjective characteristics of teacher quality to estimate the impact of rank, salary, and perceived effectiveness on student performance and subject interest. Student and course fixed effects, time of day and week controls, and students' lack of knowledge about first-year instructors help minimize selection biases. Subjective teacher evaluations perform well in measuring instructor influences on students, while objective characteristics such as rank and salary do not. Overall, the importance of college instructor differences is small, but important outliers exist.

ABSTRACT The voluntary departure of hard‐to‐replace skilled workers worsens firm prospects, which can lead to additional departures. We develop a model in which firms design compensation to limit the risk of such “worker runs.” To achieve cost‐efficient retention, firms combine fixed wages with dilutable compensation—such as vesting equity or bonus pools—which pays remaining workers more when others leave but gets diluted otherwise. Compensating (identical) workers with differently structured compensation, that is, with a different mix of output‐dependent and output‐independent pay, can further mitigate the risk of worker runs by ensuring a critical retention level in a cost‐efficient way.

ABSTRACT We investigate a seller's strategic choice between optimally structured negotiations with fewer bidders and an auction with more competing bidders when payments can have a contingent component, as is common in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), patent licensing, and employee compensation. The key factor favoring negotiations is that it allows the seller to set her preferred payment structure—that is, the revenue‐maximizing mix of cash and contingent pay; reserve prices are of secondary importance. Negotiations are more likely to dominate if synergies increase in bidders' productivity types (as with acquirer‐target complementarities in M&A). Higher dispersion and magnitude of bidders' private valuations also favor negotiations.

This article characterizes optimal compensation contracts in principal-agent settings in which the consequences of the agent’s action are only observed over time. The optimal timing of pay trades off the costs of deferred compensation arising from the agent’s relative impatience and potential consumption smoothing needs against the benefit of exploiting additional informative signals. By capturing this information benefit of deferral in terms of the likelihood ratio dynamics, our characterization covers general signal processes in a unified setting. With bilateral risk neutrality and agent limited liability, optimal contracts are high-powered and stipulate at most two payout dates. If the agent is additionally risk-averse, payouts are contingent on performance exceeding a hurdle that is increasing over time. We obtain clear-cut predictions on how the duration of optimal compensation depends on the nature of information arrival as well as agent characteristics and derive implications for the maturity structure of securities in financial contracting settings.

Administrative data from a large and diverse community college are used to examine if underrepresented minority students benefit from taking courses with underrepresented minority instructors. To identify racial interactions, we estimate models that include both student and classroom fixed effects and focus on students with limited choice in courses. We find that the performance gap in terms of class dropout rates and grade performance between white and underrepresented minority students falls by 20 to 50 percent when taught by an underrepresented minority instructor. We also find these interactions affect longer-term outcomes such as subsequent course selection, retention, and degree completion. (JEL I23, J15, J44)

ABSTRACT We analyze the effects of regulatory interference in compensation contracts, focusing on recent mandatory deferral and clawback requirements restricting incentive compensation of material risk‐takers in the financial sector. Moderate deferral requirements have a robustly positive effect on risk‐management effort only if the bank manager's outside option is sufficiently high; otherwise, their effectiveness depends on the dynamics of information arrival. Stringent deferral requirements unambiguously backfire. Our normative analysis characterizes whether and how deferral and clawback requirements should supplement capital regulation as part of the optimal policy mix.