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Working Paper
Banker Compensation, Relative Performance, and Bank Risk
A multi-agent, moral-hazard model of a bank operating under deposit insurance and limited liability is used to analyze the connection between compensation of bank employees (below CEO) and bank risk. Limited liability with deposit insurance is a force that distorts effort down. However, the need to increase compensation to risk-averse employees in order to compensate them for extra bank risk is a force that reduces this effect. Optimal contracts use relative performance and are implementable as a wage with bonuses tied to individual and firm performance. The connection between pay for ...
Working Paper
Incentive Contracting Under Ambiguity Aversion
This paper studies a principal-agent model in which the information on future firm performance is ambiguous and the agent is averse to ambiguity. We show that if firm risk is ambiguous, while stocks always induce the agent to perceive a high risk, options can induce him to perceive a low risk. As a result, options can be less costly in incentivizing the agent than stocks in the presence of ambiguity. In addition, we show that providing the agent with more incentives would induce the agent to perceive a higher risk, and there is a discontinuous jump in the compensation cost as incentives ...
Journal Article
Cash holdings and bank compensation
The experience of the 2007-09 financial crisis has prompted much consideration of the link between the structure of compensation in financial firms and excessive risk taking by their employees. A key concern has been that compensation design rewards managers for pursuing risky strategies but fails to exact penalties for decision making that leads to bank failures, financial system disruption, government bailouts, and taxpayer losses. As a way to better align management's interests with those of other stakeholders such as creditors and taxpayers, the authors propose a cash holding requirement ...
Working Paper
Bonus Question: How Does Flexible Incentive Pay Affect Wage Rigidity?
We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of inflation and unemployment dynamics. Our main result is that wage cyclicality from incentives neither affects the slope of the Phillips curve for prices nor dampens unemployment dynamics. The impulse response of unemployment in economies with flexible, procyclical incentive pay is first-order equivalent to that of economies with rigid wages. Likewise, the slope of the Phillips curve is the same in both economies. This equivalence is due to effort fluctuations, which render effective marginal costs rigid even if wages are flexible. Our ...
Working Paper
Training and Search on the Job
The paper studies human capital accumulation over workers? careers in an on the job search setting with heterogenous firms. In renegotiation proof employment con- tracts, more productive firms provide more training. Both general and specific training induce higher wages within jobs, and with future employers, even conditional on the future employer type. Because matches do not internalize the specific capital loss from employer changes, specific human capital can be over-accumulated, more so in low type firms. While validating the Acemoglu and Pischke (1999) mechanisms, the analysis ...
Working Paper
Was Sarbanes-Oxley Costly? Evidence from Optimal Contracting on CEO Compensation
This paper investigates the effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on CEO compensation, using panel data constructed for the S&P 1500 firms on CEO compensation, financial returns, and reported accounting income. Empirically SOX (i) changes the relationship between a firm?s abnormal returns and CEO compensation, (ii) changes the underlying distribution of abnormal returns, and (iii) significantly raises the expected CEO compensation in the primary sector. We develop and estimate a dynamic principal agent model of hidden information and hidden actions to explain these regularities. We find ...
Journal Article
Will Wage Growth Alone Get Workers Back Into the Labor Market? Not Likely.
This article finds that compared to baby boomers of the same age, millennials' labor force participation decisions are only about three-quarters as responsive to wage changes, and Generation X's participation decisions are only about half as responsive. These differences are not good news for employers trying to coax workers back into the labor market during a robust pandemic recovery. Using the most recent estimates, from 2019 data, the latest 6 percent year-over-year increase in average hourly pay reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is expected to only close 16 percent of ...
Working Paper
What Can We Learn from Asynchronous Wage Changes?
I document eight novel facts about wage changes and provide a theoretical framework to rationalize them. I then illustrate how this new treatment of data and theoretical framework speak to important secular and cyclical features of the macroeconomy. The evidence put forth in this paper, suggests that a theory of wage setting in which wages respond to idiosyncratic competition is an important complement to the more conventional macroeconomic view in which wage rigidity is induced by deliberately divorcing the timing of wage changes from innovations in firms' and workers' opportunities.
Journal Article
Addressing Traditional Credit Scores as a Barrier to Accessing Affordable Credit
Affordable credit enables consumers to better manage their finances, cope with unexpected emergencies, and pursue opportunities such as entrepreneurship or higher education. However, many consumers face difficulties obtaining the credit they need. A major impediment is lenders’ reliance on traditional credit scores to assess consumers’ creditworthiness. These credit scores affect not only loan approval decisions but also the interest rates consumers pay on their loans. While credit scores are intended to help lenders make informed decisions about consumers’ risk of default, they do not ...