This paper investigates how performance risk impacts a board's ability to learn about the unknown talent of a chief executive officer (CEO). We theorize that the information content of performance is increasing in idiosyncratic risk and decreasing in systematic risk. We provide robust empirical evidence that the likelihood of CEO turnover is increasing in idiosyncratic risk and decreasing in systematic risk and that turnover-performance-sensitivity is also increasing in idiosyncratic risk and decreasing in systematic risk. We further investigate relations between the threat of termination and CEO compensation, showing that for retained CEOs, both subsequent pay-performance-sensitivity and pay levels decrease in the probability of turnover.

Recent theory suggests that firms incorporate synergistic interrelationships among executives into optimal incentive design (Edmans, Goldstein, and Zhu 2013). We focus on Pay Performance Sensitivities (PPS) and use dispersion in PPS across top executives as a proxy for the incentive design component shaped by an executive team's synergy profile. We model optimal PPS dispersion and use residuals from this model to measure deviations from optimal. We find that firm performance is increasing (decreasing) in the residual when PPS dispersion is too low (too high). We conjecture that deviations from optimal are sustained by adjustment costs, finding that firms only close around 60 percent of the gap between target and actual PPS dispersion over the subsequent year. Viewing a team's equity grants as a vector, we provide evidence that firms use subsequent equity grants to actively manage PPS dispersion toward optimality. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that the deleterious effect of deviations from optimal is decreasing in the duration of a team's tenure together, and increasing in the importance of effort coordination across team members for firm performance.

We argue that reductions in shareholder taxes should lower the cost of equity capital more for financially constrained firms than for other companies. Consistent with this prediction, we find that, following the 1997 (TRA) and the 2003 (JGTRRA) cuts in U.S. individual shareholder taxes, financially constrained firms enjoyed larger reductions in their cost of equity capital than did other firms. The results are consistent with the incidence of the tax reductions falling mostly on firms with both pressing needs for capital and disproportionate ownership by individuals, the only shareholders who benefited from the legislations. The paper provides a partial explanation for the seemingly puzzling finding that, following the unprecedented 2003 reduction in dividend tax rates, non-dividend-paying firms outperformed dividend-paying firms. The results suggest that it was not dividend status that mattered, but financial constraint, a common attribute of non-dividend-paying companies. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the study.