Labor Unemployment Risk and CEO Incentive Compensation
研究发现，当失业保险福利增加时，董事会会提高CEO薪酬的凸性以鼓励风险承担，且这种效应在董事会更独立多元、长期股东持股更高以及高技能劳动力密集的行业中更强。
Unemployment risk influences workers’ incentives to invest in firm-specific human capital. This paper investigates the impact of unemployment risk on chief executive officers (CEOs)’ risk-taking incentive compensation. Exploiting state-level changes in unemployment benefits, we find that after unemployment insurance benefits become more generous, boards increase the convex payoff structure of CEO pay to encourage risk taking. The increase in CEOs’ convexity payoff is stronger in firms with more independent and diverse boards, higher ownership of long-term shareholders, and in industries requiring highly skilled labor. Our findings suggest that boards internalize workers’ interests in firms’ risk-taking decisions and executive compensation is one mechanism used. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance. Funding: K. Zhang acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72272099 and 71902115]. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4714 .