Publications
Executive compensation: the trend toward one-size-fits-all
Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2025
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WFA 2021 Best PhD Student Paper
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Presentations: WFA (2021), SFS Cavalcade (2021), MFA (2021), FOM (2020)
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, 2026
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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 Race Affect the Architecture of Executive Compensation?
(with Eliezer Fich and Lubomir Litov)
We examine whether ethnic disparities in executive compensation structure vary with the racial and institutional environment in which compensation contracts are designed. White and non-White executives in identical roles at the same firm receive systematically different compensation structures, with minority executives receiving proportionally less performance-based pay. Using role-by-firm, firm-by-year, and executive fixed effects, we find that minority non-CEO executives' compensation structures become significantly more similar to those of White executives following nearby Black Lives Matter protests and the SEC's Compensation Discussion and Analysis (CD&A) disclosure requirements. Similar convergence occurs following minority CEO appointments, particularly plausibly exogenous successions due to death or retirement, while pay-structure disparities are larger in regions with greater measured racial animus. These disparities are associated with lower realized pay for minority executives and worse firm performance, measured using both accounting outcomes and market valuations. Collectively, the evidence is difficult to reconcile with an explanation based solely on stable, race-neutral executive preferences and instead indicates that the racial and institutional environment surrounding the employment relationship affects compensation design.
Trade Associations and Shared Industry Governance
(with Gerard Hoberg and Ekaterina Neretina)
Presentations: AFA 2027 (scheduled)
We propose that trade associations induce member firms to adopt executive compensation schemes that put higher weight on industry performance relative to firm performance. An extension to classical managerial effort theory predicts this outcome. We empirically test theoretical predictions and find strong support along five dimensions: (1) plausibly exogenous shifts in trade association memberships leads to less relative performance evaluation (RPE), (2) TA members avoid other members as RPE benchmarks but prefer them as compensation peers, (3) these results do not obtain for non-TA industry peers, (4) mechanism tests favor implicit implementation of pay contracts over visible contractual provisions, and (5) a quasi-natural experiment illustrates that the resulting incentive plans are highly effective. These results illustrate a new industry dimension of executive pay that incentivizes collaborative value creation.
Can financial disclosure unlock bolder innovation?
(with Eliezer Fich)
We examine whether reducing investors' information processing costs changes not only how much firms innovate but how they innovate. We exploit a 2008 SEC reform that required small firms to adopt a standardized disclosure format without altering content. The reform eases access to external finance while leaving innovation's payoff unchanged: it transfers no resources, neither alters expected cash flows nor subsidizes innovation, and compels no secrecy-eroding disclosure. Treated firms attract investor attention, issue more equity, expand R&D and their inventor base, and increase patent output and value. Most importantly, they reorient innovation toward more novel, diverse, and exploratory projects. These shifts are strongest for firms with classified boards, revealing a complementarity between financial access and governance. They also concentrate among firms with tighter pre-reform constraints and after equity issuance. Format standardization, at no fiscal cost, can redirect innovation toward higher-risk, higher-value projects that constrained firms would otherwise forgo.
Mandatory Salary Range Disclosure and the Gender Pay Gap
(with Jessie Cheong, David Tsui, and Marshall Vance)
Pay transparency laws have been proposed as a means to reduce persistent gender pay disparities. In this paper, we use novel data from a crowdsourced compensation platform to examine whether recent laws mandating salary range disclosures in job postings narrow the gender pay gap, and whether these laws differentially affect cash versus equity compensation. Using a stacked difference-in-differences design with fixed effects to control for unobserved time-invariant differences across employers, locations, and occupations, as well as employer-wide changes over time, we find that pay transparency laws are associated with modest increases in salary for both men and women, but no reduction in the gender gap for salary. In contrast, we find that equity compensation declines substantially for women but is unchanged for men, resulting in an overall widening of the gender pay gap. Cross-sectional analyses indicate that these effects are concentrated in settings with greater scope for negotiation and higher potential for gender bias. Our results provide evidence of the consequences of mandatory salary range disclosure and highlight that pay transparency laws can have unintended effects on gender pay gaps, particularly for forms of compensation not explicitly targeted by these laws.