We investigate whether public opinion influences the level and structure of executive compensation. During 1992–2008, the negativity of press coverage of chief executive officer (CEO) pay varied significantly, with stock options being the most criticized pay component. We find that after more negative press coverage of CEO pay, firms reduce option grants and increase less contentious types of pay such as salary, although overall compensation does not change. The reduction in option pay after increased press negativity is more pronounced when firms, CEOs, and boards have stronger reputation concerns. Our within-firm, within-year identification shows the results cannot be explained by annual changes in accounting rules regarding executive compensation, stock market conditions, or pay mean reversion.

We examine whether private feedback about relative performance can mitigate moral hazard in competitive environments by modifying the agents’ self-esteem. In our experimental setting, people work harder and expect to rank better when told that they may learn their ranking, relative to cases when feedback will not be provided. Individuals who ranked better than expected decrease output but expect a better rank in the future, whereas those who ranked worse than expected increase output but lower their future rank expectations. Feedback helps create a ratcheting effect in productivity, mainly because of the fight for dominance at the top of the rank hierarchy. Our findings suggest that organizations can improve employee productivity by changing the likelihood of feedback, the reference group used to calculate relative performance, and the informativeness of the feedback message.

Emerging findings imply that distinct neurobehavioral systems process gains and losses. This study investigated whether individual differences in gain learning and loss learning might contribute to different life financial outcomes (i.e., assets versus debt). In a community sample of healthy adults (n = 75), rapid learners had smaller debt-to-asset ratios overall. More specific analyses, however, revealed that those who learned rapidly about gains had more assets, while those who learned rapidly about losses had less debt. These distinct associations remained strong even after controlling for potential cognitive (e.g., intelligence, memory, and risk preferences) and socioeconomic (e.g., age, sex, ethnicity, income, education) confounds. Self-reported measures of assets and debtwere additionally validated with credit report data in a subset of subjects. These findings support the notion that different gain and loss learning systems may exert a cumulative influence on distinct life financial outcomes.

Neuroeconomics research shows that brain areas that generate emotional states also process information about risk, rewards, and punishments, suggesting that emotions influence financial decisions in a predictable and parsimonious way. We find that positive emotional states such as excitement induce people to take risks and to be confident in their ability to evaluate investment options, while negative emotions such as anxiety have the opposite effects. Beliefs are updated so as to maintain a positive emotional state by ignoring information that contradicts individuals’ prior choices. Marketplace features or outcomes of past choices may change emotions and thus influence future financial decisions.

Efficient reward seeking is essential for survival and invariably requires overcoming costs, such as physical effort and delay, which are constantly changing in natural settings. Dopamine transmission has been implicated in decisions weighing the benefits and costs of obtaining a reward, but it is still unclear how dynamically changing effort and delay costs affect dopamine signaling to rewards and related stimuli. Using fast-scan cyclic voltammetry, we examined phasic dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) core and shell during reward-seeking behavior in rats. To manipulate the effort and time needed to earn a reward, we used instrumental tasks in which the response requirements (number of lever presses) were either fixed throughout a behavioral session [fixed ratio (FR)] or systematically increased from trial to trial [progressive ratio (PR)]. Dopamine release evoked by cues denoting reward availability was no different between these conditions, indicating insensitivity to escalating effort or delay costs. In contrast, dopamine release to reward delivery in both the NAcc core and shell increased in PR, but not in FR, sessions. This enhancement of reward-evoked dopamine signaling was also observed in sessions in which the response requirement was fixed but the delay to reward delivery increased, yoked to corresponding trials in PR sessions. These findings suggest that delay, and not effort, was principally responsible for the increased reward evoked dopamine release in PR sessions. Together, these data demonstrate that NAcc dopamine release to rewards and their predictors are dissociable and differentially regulated by the delays conferred under escalating costs.

As human life expectancy continues to rise, financial decisions of aging investors may have an increasing impact on the global economy. In this study, we examined age differences in financial decisions across the adult life span by combining functional neuroimaging with a dynamic financial investment task. During the task, older adults made more suboptimal choices than younger adults when choosing risky assets. This age-related effect was mediated by a neural measure of temporal variability in nucleus accumbens activity. These findings reveal a novel neural mechanism by which aging may disrupt rational financial choice.

Business connections can mitigate agency conflicts by facilitating efficient information transfers, but can also be channels for inefficient favoritism. I analyze these two effects in the mutual fund industry and find that fund directors and advisory firms that manage the funds hire each other preferentially based on the intensity of their past interactions. I do not find evidence that stronger board-advisor ties correspond to better or worse outcomes for fund shareholders. These results are consistent with the notion that the two effects of board-management connections on investor welfare – improved monitoring and increased potential for collusion – balance out in this setting.

Individuals vary in their willingness to take financial risks. Here we show that variants of two genes that regulate dopamine and serotonin neurotransmission and have been previously linked to emotional behavior, anxiety and addiction (5-HTTLPR and DRD4) are significant determinants of risk taking in investment decisions. We find that the 5-HTTLPR s/s allele carriers take 28% less risk than those carrying the s/l or l/l alleles of the gene. DRD4 7-repeat allele carriers take 25% more risk than individuals without the 7-repeat allele. These findings contribute to the emerging literature on the genetic determinants of economic behavior.

In functional magnetic resonance imaging research, nucleus accumbens (NAcc) activation spontaneously increases before financial risk taking. As anticipation of diverse rewards can increase NAcc activation, even incidental reward cues may influence financial risk taking. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we predicted and found that anticipation of viewing rewarding stimuli(erotic pictures for 15 heterosexual men) increased financial risk taking, and that this effect was partially mediated by increases in NAcc activation. These results are consistent with the notion that incidental reward cues influence financial risk taking by altering anticipatory affect, and so identify a neuropsychological mechanism that may underlie effective emotional appeals in financial, marketing, and political domains.

Investors systematically deviate from rationality when making financial decisions, yet the mechanisms responsible for these deviations have not been identified. Using event-related fMRI, we examined whether anticipatory neural activity would predict optimal and suboptimal choices in a financial decision-making task. We characterized two types of deviations from the optimal investment strategy of a rational risk-neutral agent as risk-seeking mistakes and risk-aversion mistakes. Nucleus accumbens activation preceded risky choices as well as risk-seeking mistakes, while anterior insula activation preceded riskless choices as well as risk-aversion mistakes. These findings suggest that distinct neural circuits linked to anticipatory affect promote different types of financial choices, and indicate that excessive activation of these circuits may lead to investing mistakes. Thus, consideration of anticipatory neural mechanisms may add predictive power to the rational actor model of economic decision-making.

This study asks whether investors learn differently from gains versus losses, whether learning is better or worse when people are actively investing in a security or passively observing its payoffs, and whether there are personal characteristics that drive learning performance. Experimental evidence shows that the ability to learn from financial information is worse in the loss domain, especially if investors have personally experienced the prior outcomes of the assets considered. Heterogeneity in learning errors across investors is particularly high following negative outcomes. Learning performance is determined by financial literacy and by a genetic factor related to memory and emotion control.

Theoretically and empirically, we find that firms consider potential employees using a real options approach, as they do when making other types of capital investment decisions. Firms value probationary employment arrangements that provide the option to learn about the productivity of workers before permanent investment occurs. Higher uncertainty and adjustment costs hinder permanent investment and increase the value of this option. Greater competition for workers speeds up investment, increasing the value of probationary employment. Higher worker redeployability leads to more investment if firms face sufficiently low competition. Novel data from the labor market from MBA graduates confirms these implications.

There is widespread concern about whether CEOs are appropriately punished for poor performance. While CEOs are more likely to be forced out if their performance is poor relative to the industry average, overall industry performance also matters. This seems puzzling if termination is disciplinary, however, we show that both absolute and relative performance-driven turnover is a natural and efficient outcome in a competitive assignment model in which CEOs and firms form matches based on multiple characteristics. The model also has new predictions about replacement managers’ equilibrium pay and performance. We document CEO turnover events during 1992-2006 and provide empirical support for our model.

Financial decision making has a significant genetic component, but it is still unknown how genes influence choice. Focusing on the serotonin transporter gene, we find that individuals possessing the short version of the gene invest less in equities, are less engaged in actively making investments decisions, and have fewer credit lines. Short gene carriers do not differ from others with respect to cognitive skills, education, or wealth. However, psychological and brain imaging evidence shows they have higher levels of neuroticism and suggests that genetically-driven negative emotional reactions induce the short gene carriers to avoid risky and complex financial choices.

While recent work shows that characteristics of managers influence firm performance, evidence regarding the selection of managers into firms is scarce. This paper uses novel data from the labor market for MBA graduates to understand how these individuals search and compete for jobs. I find that candidates search harder if they have lower ability or worse outside options, the job sought is more valuable, or if firms are more likely to hire. Candidates self-select into positions for which they are better qualified and higher ability types choose to compete for better paying jobs, such as those in the financial industry.

We consider a ``managerial optimal'' framework for top executive compensation, where top management sets their own compensation subject to limited entrenchment, instead of the conventional setting where such compensation is set by a board that maximizes firm value. Top management would like to pay themselves as much as possible, but are constrained by the need to ensure sufficient efficiency to avoid a replacement. Shareholders can remove a manager, but only at a cost, and will therefore only do so if the anticipated future value of the manager (given by anticipated future performance net of future compensation) falls short of that of a replacement by this replacement cost. In this setting, observable compensation (salary) and hidden compensation (perks, pet projects, pensions, etc.) serve different roles for management and have different costs, and both are used in equilibrium. We examine the relationship between observable and hidden compensation and other variables in a dynamic model, and derive a number of unique predictions regarding these two types of pay. We then test these implications and find results that generally support the predictions of our model.

This paper analyzes the dynamics of contractual agreements between mutual funds and investment advisors. Using a new dataset that covers U.S. funds between 1993-2002, I find cross-sectional and time-series determinants of advisory contracts. I show that funds rarely experience contractual renegotiation and advisor changes. However, these changes are beneficial: decreases in advisory rates significantly increase subsequent fund performance and net inflows. Separating from an advisor has a significant positive effect on the subsequent ranking of mid-performing funds. These results are puzzling: contractual changes are rare, in spite of their economically significant benefits.