Yesterday's Heroes: Compensation and Risk at Financial Firms
研究了金融企业风险与高管薪酬的关系，发现风险较高的企业会支付更高薪酬以补偿经理人承担的股权风险，且这类企业生产率更高、更受机构投资者青睐。
ABSTRACT Many believe that compensation, misaligned from shareholders’ value due to managerial entrenchment, caused financial firms to take risks before the financial crisis of 2008. We argue that, even in a classical principal‐agent setting without entrenchment and with exogenous firm risk, riskier firms may offer higher total pay as compensation for the extra risk in equity stakes borne by risk‐averse managers. Using long lags of stock price risk to capture exogenous firm risk, we confirm our conjecture and show that riskier firms are also more productive and more likely to be held by institutional investors, who are most able to influence compensation.