In this paper we study CEO contract design employing a unique dataset on privately-held and public firm CEO annual compensation over the period 1999–2011. We first show that CEOs in public firms are paid 30% more than CEOs in comparable privately-held firms. We further show that both private and public firm CEO pays are positively and significantly related to firm accounting performance, and that the pay–performance link is much weaker in privately-held firms. We then show that the above findings are robust to accounting for firms' self-selection into being privately-held, and a number of important differences between privately-held and public firms, including CEO ownership, employee stock ownership, stock liquidity, discipline from the takeover market, and the availability of different performance measures. Overall, our results support the view that concentrated ownership substitutes for CEO performance-based compensation contracts.

We propose a continuous-time heterogeneous agent model consisting of fundamental, momentum, and contrarian traders to explain the significant time series momentum. We show that the performance of momentum strategy is determined by both time horizon and the market dominance of momentum traders. Specifically, when momentum traders are more active in the market, momentum strategies with short (long) time horizons stabilize (destabilize) the market, and meanwhile the market under-reacts (over-reacts) in short-run (long-run). This provides profit opportunity for time series momentum strategies with short horizons and reversal with long horizons. When momentum traders are less active in the market, they always lose. The results provide an insight into the profitability of time series momentum documented in recent empirical studies.