The Effect of Risk on the CEO Market

Alex Edmans and Xavier Gabaix

The Review of Financial Studies, 2011, vol. 24, issue 8, 2822-2863

Abstract: This article presents a market equilibrium model of CEO assignment, pay, and incentives under risk aversion and moral hazard. Each of the three outcomes can be summarized by a single closed-form equation. In the presence of moral hazard, assignment is distorted from positive assortative matching on firm size as firms with 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 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 can affect firm risk, incentives rise and are increasing in risk and risk aversion. We calibrate the losses from various forms of poor corporate governance, such as failures in monitoring and inefficiencies in CEO assignment. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (58)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhq153 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:24:y:2011:i:8:p:2822-2863

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().