Industry Tournament Incentives
Review of Financial Studies, Forthcoming
61 Pages Posted: 15 Mar 2012 Last revised: 22 Jun 2017
Date Written: August 20, 2013
Abstract
We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk increase in the external pay gap, with these incentive effects increasing in the probability of the executive winning the tournament. GMM-IV estimates indicate that the external, industry pay gap is reliably and positively associated with firm performance and risk and with the riskiness of investment and financial policy. The effect of the industry tournament incentive is stronger when empirical proxies indicate the probability of the executive winning is higher.
Keywords: Industry tournament incentives, CEO incentives, CEO compensation, Firm performance, Firm risk
JEL Classification: G31, G32, G34, J31, J33, L25
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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