Explore the vast range of titles available.

Most research linking compensation to strategy relies on agency theory economics and focuses on executive pay. We instead focus on the strategic compensation of nonexecutive employees, arguing that while agency theory provides a useful framework for analyzing compensation, it fails to consider several psychological factors that increase costs from performance-based pay. We examine how psychological costs from social comparison and overconfidence reduce the efficacy of individual performance-based compensation, building a theoretical framework predicting more prominent use of team-based, seniority-based, and flatter compensation. We argue that compensation is strategic not only in motivating and attracting the worker being compensated but also in its impact on peer workers and the firm's complementary activities. The paper discusses empirical implications and possible theoretical extensions of the proposed integrated theory.

This thematic issue explores the complex and often controversial intersection of foster care and financial compensation. While foster care is often seen as a more inclusive and family-oriented alternative to institutional care, the role of money in caregiving remains morally and socially sensitive. Drawing on sociological theories, particularly Viviana Zelizer's concept of \"hostile worlds,\" the articles examine how economic and intimate spheres are negotiated in the contexts of foster care. Contributions from multiple countries highlight how foster parents, social workers, and policymakers navigate the tension between professionalism and altruism, as well as between love and money. The thematic issue addresses historical shifts in compensation practices, cultural ambivalence toward paid caregiving, and the practical realities of foster families' financial needs. Case studies from Australia, Bulgaria, England, Norway, Romania, South Africa, and Sweden illustrate how foster care is framed as both work and family life, with implications for policy, legal status, and emotional labour. The issue also considers how kinship care complicates traditional boundaries between private and public roles. By analysing how money is discussed, avoided, or justified in foster care, the collection sheds light on broader welfare dilemmas: how to balance moral imperatives with economic constraints. Ultimately, the volume argues that caregiving should not be reduced to either love or money but understood as a hybrid practice where financial support can enable, rather than undermine, authentic care.

In contrast to broad generalizations about the short-termism of managers, this paper explains changes in the temporal orientation of specific firms over time based on performance relative to aspirations and top management team incentives. We gain empirical traction on temporal orientation by measuring the durability of acquired property, plant, and equipment (asset durability) from reported data on depreciation expense. Consistent with predictions, we find that performance relative to aspirations positively influences asset durability. Surprisingly, we find no evidence that stock-based compensation produces the same effect. Instead, we find stock-based compensation lowers asset durability.

Our paper examines the initial compensation of new CEOs hired in turnaround situations. Building on prior literature on executive job demands, we posit that new CEOs hired in turnaround situations will receive higher pay, particularly higher performance-based pay, and that the pay premium will incentivize them to undertake retrenchment and restructuring turnaround initiatives. An interaction between pay premium and CEO credentials is shown to have a stronger effect on the extent to which firms engage in such turnaround initiatives. Our empirical results, based on 98 new CEOs hired in 223 turnaround situations, largely support our arguments. We discuss the contribution of our study to the CEO compensation, executive job demands, and corporate turnaround literature.

One explanation that has been proposed for rising inequality is that technical change allows highly talented individuals, or “superstars” to manage or perform on a larger scale, applying their talent to greater pools of resources and reaching larger numbers of people, thus becoming more productive and higher paid. Others argue that managerial power has increased in a way that allows those at the top to receive higher pay, that social norms against higher pay levels have broken down, or that tax policy affects the distribution of surpluses between employers and employees. We offer evidence bearing on the different theories explaining the rise in inequality in the United States over recent decades. First we look the increase in pay at the highest income levels across occupations. We consider the income share of the top 1 percent over time. And we turn to evidence on inequality of wealth at the top. In looking at the wealthiest Americans, we find that those in the Forbes 400 are less likely to have inherited their wealth or to have grown up wealthy. The Forbes 400 of today also are those who were able to access education while young and apply their skills to the most scalable industries: technology, finance, and mass retail. We believe that the US evidence on income and wealth shares for the top 1 percent is most consistent with a “superstar”-style explanation rooted in the importance of scale and skill-biased technological change. It is less consistent with an argument that the gains to the top 1 percent are rooted in greater managerial power or changes in social norms about what managers should earn.

In assessing the performance of the CEO, subjectivity by the board of directors is often present in one form or another. We specifically focus on: (1) the ex ante option to ex post override a formula-based contract (\" discretionary bonus\"), and (2) the ex ante absence of any formula in a contract (\"subjective weights\"). We argue that the two types of deviations are driven by different contracting problems, which relate to whether post-contract information does or does not affect the agent's optimal action choice. We refer to these different contracting problems as problems of risk and problems of noncongruity, respectively, and hypothesize that discretionary bonuses are used for risk-reduction purposes, while subjective weights on different performance dimensions are used for congruity-improvement purposes. Our results are consistent with our expectations, showing that the use of the different types of subjectivity is consistent with optimal contracting considerations.

`Gerhart and Rynes provide a thorough, comprehensive review of the vast literatures relevant to compensation′ - Alison Barber, Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University Compensation provides a comprehensive, research-based review of both the determinants and effects of compensation. Combining theory and research from a variety of disciplines, Barry Gerhart and Sara Rynes examine the three major compensation decisions-pay level, pay structure and pay delivery systems.

This paper investigates managerial discretion in compensation decisions in a team setting, in which a measure of the team's aggregate performance is readily available from the accounting system. Specifically, we examine the willingness of managers to obtain additional, costly information that would supplement this measure and allow the managers to more accurately assess individual contributions to team output. Using theory from behavioral economics that incorporates social preferences (i.e., fairness and trust reciprocity) into the managers' utility function, we predict and demonstrate experimentally that managers' willingness to obtain the costly information increases as the team's aggregate performance becomes a more noisy measure of individual performance. Further, we predict and demonstrate that managers' willingness will be greater for relatively high versus relatively low levels of aggregate performance. The study contributes to the literature on subjective performance evaluation by identifying how social preferences influence managers' use of discretion in evaluation processes.

Foster care provides a family-like upbringing for children who cannot stay with their biological parents for various reasons. While the practice of paying foster parents is not questioned, the level of the fee and how it is spent (or not spent) are morally charged matters. Foster parents' motives may be questioned by the media, neighbors, or social workers, who may suspect financial gain. Although these payments are essential and may be crucial to the successful recruitment of foster parents (of whom there is a severe shortage), the issue of foster parent remuneration is fraught with sensitivity, suspicion, and blame. This article analyzes the suspicions about money that foster parents encounter or reproduce, ranging from subtle educational comments to explicit blame. Building on the argument of economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer that money is often defined as corrupting in family, kinship, and friendship relationships, the analysis suggests that foster parents learn to navigate, but also reproduce, suspicions about reimbursement through encounters with websites, social workers, and foster parent communities. They avoid answering direct questions about financial compensation but prepare ready-made answers and phrases to prevent potential blame. This study is part of a three-year research project on foster homes and money. The material consists of texts (official and social media) and interviews with foster parents.

Most research on engagement in foster care is located within a moral discourse characterized by dichotomies, with the economic aspects of foster care being especially contested. In this article, the following question is discussed: How could the engagement of foster carers in a late modern welfare state be conceptualized and researched? A theoretically inspired and empirically informed analytical model is suggested, constituting foster care as a culturally and historically situated case of care arrangements. An interview study with children and adults in 18 Norwegian foster families has informed the analytical model, and empirical illustrations are drawn from this study. The discussion is mainly at a conceptual level, aiming at challenging dichotomized and decontextualized conceptions of foster care. \"Money, love, and work\" are interrelated discursive themes and represent a simplified figure of the complex activity that constitutes foster care. They are involved in all care arrangements, parenting, as well as foster care. In the case of the latter, the significance of these themes is negotiated at a political, an institutional, and a cultural level. Further, they are negotiated at the personal and interpersonal level by the children and adults who share their everyday life in foster families, as they make sense of the care practices they are involved in. It is argued that foster care studies should transcend the individual level and include more levels of analysis.