Executive Compensation and Stock Options: An Inconvenient Truth
Abstract
We reexamine the issue of executive compensation within a general equilibrium production context. Intertemporal optimality places strong restrictions on the form of a representative manager's compensation contract, restrictions that appear to be incompatible with the fact that the bulk of many high-profile managers' compensation is in the form of various options and option-like rewards. We therefore measure the extent to which a convex contract alone can induce the manager to adopt near-optimal investment and hiring decisions. To ask this question is essentially to ask if such contracts can effectively align the stochastic discount factor of the manager with that of the shareholder-workers. We detail exact circumstances under which this alignment is possible and when it is not.Download Info
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number 6890.Length:
Date of creation: Jun 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:6890
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Related research
Keywords: business cycles; convex contracts; corporate governance; executive compensation; optimal contracting; stock options;Other versions of this item:
- Jean-Pierre Danthine & John B. Donaldson, 2008. "Executive Compensation and Stock Options: An Inconvenient Truth," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 08-13, Swiss Finance Institute.
- E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
- E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2008-07-05 (All new papers)
- NEP-BEC-2008-07-05 (Business Economics)
- NEP-DGE-2008-07-05 (Dynamic General Equilibrium)
- NEP-MAC-2008-07-05 (Macroeconomics)
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