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Risk and the CEO Market: Why Do Some Large Firms Hire Highly-Paid, Low-Talent CEOs?

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  • Gabaix, Xavier
  • Edmans, Alex

Abstract

This paper presents a market equilibrium model of CEO assignment, pay and incentives under risk aversion and heterogeneous moral hazard. Each of the three outcomes can be summarized by a single closed-form equation. In assignment models without moral hazard, allocation depends only on firm size and the equilibrium is efficient. Here, talent assignment is distorted by the agency problem as firms involving higher risk or disutility choose less talented CEOs. Such firms also pay higher salaries in the cross-section, but economy-wide increases in risk or the disutility of being a CEO (e.g. due to regulation) do not affect pay. The strength of incentives depends only on the disutility of effort and is independent of risk and risk aversion. If the CEO affects the volatility as well as mean of firm returns, incentives rise and are increasing in risk and risk aversion. We calibrate the efficiency losses from various forms of poor corporate governance, such as failures in monitoring and inefficiencies in CEO assignment. The losses from misallocation of talent are orders of magnitude higher than from inefficient risk-sharing.

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  • Gabaix, Xavier & Edmans, Alex, 2010. "Risk and the CEO Market: Why Do Some Large Firms Hire Highly-Paid, Low-Talent CEOs?," CEPR Discussion Papers 7836, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:7836
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    Cited by:

    1. Oriana Bandiera & Luigi Guiso & Andrea Prat & Raffaella Sadun, 2015. "Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 33(3), pages 623-681.
    2. Jacek Rothert, 2015. "Monitoring, moral hazard, and turnover," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 58(2), pages 355-374, February.
    3. Dittmann, Ingolf & Maug, Ernst & Zhang, Dan, 2011. "Restricting CEO pay," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 1200-1220, September.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Assignment; Executive compensation; Incentives; Market equilibrium; Risk; Talent;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs

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