This paper considers a two-period model in which managers have superior information about their ability to forecast the realization of given investment projects. Firms compete for managers by offering short-run contracts. As future salaries depend on current play through its impact on managerial reputation, managers' investment decisions are affected by their concern for their future careers. We analyze the interaction between these implicit incentives, created by managers' career concerns, and the explicit incentives made possible by contingent compensation. We show that managers' career concerns create perverse incentives that are robust to the introduction of contingent contracting. We also find that while managerial compensation is monotonically increasing in profit at date 2, it is not at date 1. Two numerical exercises relate the implications of our results to the literature on the link between pay and performance. In line with empirical findings, we find that: i) the pay-performance sensitivity is highest in the final period of managers' employment; ii) higher pay-performance sensitivities are associated with a lower variance of profits.
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Paper provided by Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de EconomÃa in its series Economics Working Papers with number
we014811.
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Scharfstein, David. & Stein, Jeremy C., 1988.
"Herd behavior and investment,"
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WP 2062-88., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
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