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Full-Text Articles in Law
Killing Conscience: The Unintended Behavioral Consequences Of "Pay For Performance", Lynn A. Stout
Killing Conscience: The Unintended Behavioral Consequences Of "Pay For Performance", Lynn A. Stout
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Contemporary lawmakers and reformers often argue that ex ante incentive contracts providing for large material rewards are the best and possibly only way to motivate corporate executives and other employees to serve their firms' interests. This Article offers a critique of the "pay for performance" approach. In particular, it explores why, for a variety of mutually reinforcing reasons, workplaces that rely on ex ante incentive contracts suppress unselfish prosocial behavior (conscience) and promote selfishness and opportunism. The end result may not be more efficient, but more uncooperative, unethical, and illegal employee behavior.
Paying For Risk: Bankers, Compensation, And Competition, Simone M. Sepe, Charles K. Whitehead
Paying For Risk: Bankers, Compensation, And Competition, Simone M. Sepe, Charles K. Whitehead
Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers
Efforts to control bank risk address the wrong problem in the wrong way. They presume that the financial crisis was caused by CEOs who failed to supervise risk-taking employees. The responses focus on executive pay, believing that executives will bring non-executives into line—using incentives to manage risk-taking—once their own pay is regulated. What they overlook is the effect on non-executive pay of the competition for talent. Even if executive pay is regulated, and executives act in the bank’s best interests, they will still be trapped into providing incentives that encourage risk-taking by non-executives due to the negative externality that arises …
Lawyers And Fools: Lawyer-Directors In Public Corporations, Lubomir P. Litov, Simone M. Sepe, Charles K. Whitehead
Lawyers And Fools: Lawyer-Directors In Public Corporations, Lubomir P. Litov, Simone M. Sepe, Charles K. Whitehead
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
The accepted wisdom—that a lawyer who becomes a corporate director has a fool for a client—is outdated. The benefits of lawyer-directors in today’s world significantly outweigh the costs. Beyond monitoring, they help manage litigation and regulation, as well as structure compensation to align CEO and shareholder interests. The results have been an average 9.5% increase in firm value and an almost doubling in the percentage of public companies with lawyer-directors.
This Article is the first to analyze the rise of lawyer-directors. It makes a variety of other empirical contributions, each of which is statistically significant and large in magnitude. First, …