This paper investigates the impact of the founding family’s presence on CEO turnover decisions. We find that family firms managed by CEOs outside the founding family (i.e., professional CEO family firms) have higher CEO turnover-performance sensitivity than family firms managed by family members (i.e., family CEO firms) or non-family firms. These results are robust to alternative performance measures and CEO turnover definitions. Additional analyses indicate that higher family ownership leads to even higher (lower) turnover-performance sensitivity in professional CEO family firms (family CEO firms). These results indicate that, with regard to CEO turnover decisions, better monitoring of CEOs by family owners leads to the alleviation of agency conflicts, but the power of family CEOs leads to potential family entrenchment.

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.

We conceptualize equity incentive contracting as a dynamic process in which contracting frictions limit the speed at which equity incentives adjust to target levels. Slower adjustment speeds imply more prolonged deviations from value-maximizing targets and thus more severe negative effects on future performance. We find that contracting frictions significantly slow the speed of adjustment to target incentives (SOA). Consistent with frictions prolonging the persistence of deviations from target, we find that contracting frictions magnify the negative influence of deviations on future firm performance. Further, we find that the influence of contracting frictions on SOA operates through boards’ equity grant decisions. Our dynamic contracting perspective offers new insight into the relation between CEO incentives and firm performance by providing novel evidence that the speed of convergence to target incentives is a defining feature of the dynamic contracting process that translates inefficiency effects of contracting frictions into lower future performance. Data Availability: All data are publicly available from sources indicated in the text.

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.

This paper demonstrates that the equilibrium impact of capital gains taxes reflects both the capitalization effect (i.e., capital gains taxes decrease demand) and the lock‐in effect (i.e., capital gains taxes decrease supply). Depending on time periods and stock characteristics, either effect may dominate. Using the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 as our event, we find evidence supporting a dominant capitalization effect in the week following news that sharply increased the probability of a reduction in the capital gains tax rate and a dominant lock‐in effect in the week after the rate reduction became effective.