We investigate simultaneously the impact of promotion‐based tournament incentives for VPs and equity‐based (alignment) incentives for VPs and the chief executive officer (CEO) on firm performance. We find that tournament incentives, as measured by the pay differential between the CEO and VPs, relate positively to firm performance. The relation is more positive when the CEO nears retirement and less positive when the firm has a new CEO, and weakens further when the new CEO is an outsider. Our analysis is robust to corrections for endogeneity of all our incentive measures and to several alternative measures of tournament incentives and firm performance.

This manuscript is a “work of the United States Government ” within the meaning of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101. As such, the manuscript is not entitled to copyright protection, 17 U.S.C. § 105. Accordingly, the manuscript is in the public domain as a matter of law.

This paper studies the second-moment properties of offshoring, the arrangement whereby firms carry out particular stages of production abroad. It documents a new empirical regularity: maquiladora industries in Mexico that are associated with US offshoring experience fluctuations in employment that are twice as volatile as the corresponding industries in the United States. This finding is not attributable simply to higher volatility in the overall Mexican economy, nor to the smaller size of Mexico's industries compared to US counterparts.

We examine the impacts of increased US gasoline taxes in a model that links the markets for new, used, and scrapped vehicles and recognizes the considerable heterogeneity among households and cars. Household choice parameters derive from an estimation procedure that integrates individual choices for car ownership and miles traveled. We find that each cent-per-gallon increase in the price of gasoline reduces the equilibrium gasoline consumption by about 0.2 percent. Taking account of revenue recycling, the impact of a 25-cent gasoline tax increase on the average household is about $30 per year (2001 dollars). Distributional impacts depend importantly on how additional revenues from the tax increase are recycled.

Risk Preferences in the PSID: Individual Imputations and Family Covariation by Miles S. Kimball, Claudia R. Sahm and Matthew D. Shapiro. Published in volume 99, issue 2, pages 363-68 of American Economic Review, May 2009

This study examines whether peer reviews conducted under the AICPA's self-regulatory model have been effective at signaling audit quality. Prior research has examined whether peer-review reports are associated with perceived audit quality. We examine whether peer-review reports are associated with actual audit quality. Using a unique data set obtained from the files of an insurance company, we find that peer-review findings are indeed useful in predicting audit failure (i.e., malpractice claims alleging auditor negligence), and that certain types of findings are particularly useful in this regard. We also find that peer-review findings are associated with other firm-specific indicators of potentially weak quality control or risky practices within accounting firms. Taken together, we interpret our findings to indicate that self-regulated peer review as mandated by the AICPA does provide effective signals regarding audit-firm quality.

Integrated GDP-Productivity Accounts by Michael J. Harper, Brent R. Moulton, Steven Rosenthal and David B. Wasshausen. Published in volume 99, issue 2, pages 74-79 of American Economic Review, May 2009

The financing of R&D provides a potentially important channel to link finance and economic growth, but there is no direct evidence that financial effects are large enough to impact aggregate R&D. U.S. firms finance R&D from volatile sources: cash flow and stock issues. We estimate dynamic R&D models for high‐tech firms and find significant effects of cash flow and external equity for young, but not mature, firms. The financial coefficients for young firms are large enough that finance supply shifts can explain most of the dramatic 1990s R&D boom, which implies a significant connection between finance, innovation, and growth.