This paper examines the effect of CEOs’ outside opportunities on the use of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in CEO compensation. My tests exploit the staggered rejection of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by US state courts as an exogenous increase in CEOs’ outside opportunities. I find that the rejection of the IDD leads to a significant increase in the sensitivity of CEO pay to systematic performance (less RPE). This increase is more pronounced for CEOs with greater labor market mobility and industries where proprietary information is more important and not related to measures of governance quality. These results suggest that firms link CEO pay to systematic performance to retain talent and ensure participation.

ABSTRACT This paper studies shareholder derivative lawsuits related to CEO compensation. We document that compensation lawsuits are more likely to be filed against firms with higher CEO pay, especially in the presence of poor firm performance. Firms reduce the level of CEO compensation after lawsuits, which leads to CEO departures and declines in CEO effort provisions, and consequently, results in deteriorated firm performance. Interestingly, compensation lawsuits accompanied by low support in the preceding Say‐on‐Pay votes, which likely capture the quality of pay practices, are associated with even higher pay cuts, but do not harm firm performance or lead to departures of talented CEOs, supporting the idea that suboptimal pay and deteriorated performance after compensation lawsuits are driven by the lack of a sophisticated understanding of CEO pay by plaintiff shareholders.

This paper examines audit offices’ human capital investment in response to client restatement announcements and the resulting effects on audit quality and audit office client base. We find that audit offices attempt to acquire human capital and talent by posting more audit-related job positions just after a client announces a restatement. The increase in job postings follows restatements with more negative announcement returns and restatements of annual financial statements, and is concentrated among more senior and experienced positions. Importantly, the increased job postings are not driven by replacement hiring due to individual auditor departures and reflect more auditors joining the office. These human capital investments reduce future client misstatements and losses in client portfolios, indicating improvements in actual and perceived audit quality. Audit offices are also more likely to replace audit managing partners and prevent the signing partners of the misstated financial statements from signing new audit reports after restatement announcements.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the influence of labor market power in the audit profession. Using a dataset of online job postings, we confirm that audit offices in more concentrated labor markets have greater labor market power and exercise it in the form of higher skill requirements and greater required effort from their auditors, at similar or slightly lower wages. We then show that client firms of audit offices in more concentrated labor markets are less likely to restate their earnings and have lower absolute discretionary accruals. These findings are only present when employees have lower mobility across professions and geographies, consistent with audit offices’ power in the local labor market explaining the results. Collectively, our findings highlight the importance of labor market power in understanding audit quality. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: J31; J40; J42; M42; M55.