Respondable risk and incentives for CEOs: The role of information-collection and decision-making

This paper examines the incentive provision when the agent can respond to risk by exerting effort to collect information about the underlying state and making corresponding decisions. Such effort is shown to be more valuable in a riskier environment and incentives can increase with “respondable” risk. The relation between incentives and risk is more positive when the agent's effort is more effective in collecting information or in acting upon it. Using data on chief executive officers (CEOs), I find that incentives for CEOs increase with industry-wide risk, a measure of respondable risk. The positive relation diminishes when the CEO is less able to collect information or is less effective in acting upon it.