CEOs' Outside Employment Opportunities and the Lack of Relative Performance Evaluation in Compensation Contracts
检验了Oyer(2004)的理论：当CEO的外部就业机会随经济形势变化时，企业最优选择是不采用相对绩效评估。作者用CEO的媒体曝光度和行业调整后的ROA作为外部机会的代理变量，找到了支持该理论的证据。
ABSTRACT Although agency theory suggests that firms should index executive compensation to remove market‐wide effects (i.e., RPE), there is little evidence to support this theory. Oyer (2004, Journal of Finance 59, 1619–1649) posits that an absence of RPE is optimal if the CEO's reservation wages from outside employment opportunities vary with the economy's fortunes. We directly test and find support for Oyer's (2004) theory. We argue that the CEO's outside opportunities depend on his talent, as proxied by the CEO's financial press visibility and his firm's industry‐adjusted ROA. Our results are robust to alternate explanations such as managerial skimming, oligopoly, and asymmetric benchmarking.