Research highlights how bonus pay drives out top government financial regulators

WRDS sponsored the 2026 ECGI Finance Prize for the Best Paper in the 2025 ECGI Finance Working Paper Series.


Jason ChenÌý(Auburn University), Jakub HajdaÌý(HEC Montréal), Joseph Kalmenovitz (University of Rochester)

The paper studies the compensation of top executives in federal agencies that oversee firms and financial markets. The structure of executive pay can simultaneously affect effort, career choices, and the composition of the leadership responsible for executive compensation and incentives beyond firms to monitoring firms. This leads to extending beyond firms to the core governance questions about executive compensation and incentives, beyond firms to the public-sector executives responsible for overseeing them.

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