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Publications

Executive compensation: the trend toward one-size-fits-all     
Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2025

  • WFA 2021 Best PhD Student Paper

  • Presentations: WFA (2021), SFS Cavalcade (2021), MFA (2021), FOM (2020)

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I report and analyze a recent “one-size-fits-all” trend in the structure of executive compensation plans. Since 2006, 24% of the variation in the distribution of CEO compensation across pay components –salary, bonus, stock awards, options, non-equity incentives, pensions, and perquisites— disappeared. This uniformity might come at the expense of optimal incentives, as increases in pay structure similarity translate into lower shareholder value. Using panel data regressions and plausibly exogenous shocks, I find that institutional investors’ influence, proxy advisors’ recommendations, and expanded compensation disclosure are salient drivers of this standardization. The findings highlight an unintended consequence of recent regulations enhancing shareholders’ participation and expanding compensation disclosure.

Leaky director networks and innovation herding  (with Gerard Hoberg)

Review of Financial Studies, 2025

  • Presentations: NBER Big Data and Securities Markets (2023), AFA (2023)

We first document that, despite potential legal issues, overlapping directors are surprisingly prevalent among direct competitors. Using panel data regressions and plausibly exogenous shocks, we find that competing firms in markets with dense overlapping-director networks experience innovation herding, lose product differentiation, and ultimately perform poorly.  Novel text-based network propagation tests of technologies show that intellectual property leakage plays a role as firms with dense overlapping director networks experience faster propagation of technologies to competitors. Our findings suggest a coordination problem where industry participants cannot stop rivals from earning small gains from leakage despite much larger industry-wide negative externalities.

Working Papers

Does executive compensation structure reflect racial bias?
(with Eliezer Fich and Lubomir Litov) 

White and non-White executives in identical roles at the same firm exhibit systematically different compensation structures, with minorities receiving proportionally less performance-based pay. Using role-by-firm, firm-by-year, and executive fixed effects, we find minority compensation structures become 8% more similar to White executives’ after nearby Black Lives Matter protests, suggesting racial bias. Similar convergence occurs when minorities become CEO (particularly via exogenous succession) and in tests exploiting cross-sectional variation in regional racial-attitude indices, plausibly exogenous to firms. Pay structure disparities correlate with higher race-based pay inequality and lower firm performance, underscoring the substantial economic costs of racial bias in compensation design.

Can financial disclosure unlock bolder innovation?
(with Eliezer Fich) 

This paper examines how access to external financing affects firms' innovation strategies. Exploiting a 2008 SEC reform requiring small firms to adopt a standardized disclosure format without altering content, we find that reduced investor processing costs increased external financing by 11% and investor attention by 16%. Treated firms responded with greater R&D spending, higher patent output and value, and improved innovation efficiency. They increased patent filings by 10% and patent value by 7%, while shifting toward more novel, diverse, and exploratory innovation strategies. These effects are stronger under governance structures that insulate managers from short-term pressures, highlighting the complementary roles of financial access and internal governance. Our findings show that relaxing capital market frictions affects not only the quantity but also the nature of innovation, encouraging riskier, high-value projects. By isolating the effects of format standardization, our identification approach underscores the economic importance of disclosure transparency in shaping innovation outcomes.

Permanent Working Papers

The effect of mandatory information disclosure on financial constraints

  • Presentations: AFA (2019), Trans-Atlantic Doctoral Conference (2019)

This paper examines the effects of mandatory disclosure systems on firms’ financial constraints and investment policies. I study a regulatory reform that eliminated the special disclosure system of small firms and integrated it into the standard disclosure system of large firms. Companies that voluntarily used the standard system before the reform become less debt-constrained, issue more debt and increase their investment. The findings are consistent with mandatory disclosure providing a commitment device for future disclosure that reduces the agency cost of debt.

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