This paper studies the gender compensation gap among high-level executives in US corpora-
tions. We use the ExecuComp data set that contains information on total compensation for the
top five highest paid executives of a large group of US firms over the period 1992-1997. About
2.5% of the executives in the sample are women. These women earn about 45% less than their
male counterparts. As much as 75% of this gap can be accounted for by the fact that women
manage smaller companies and are less likely to be CEO; Chair, or President of their company.
The unexplained gender gap can be reduced to less than 5% when one further accounts for the
fact that female executives are younger and have less seniority than male executives. Over the
period under study, women have nearly tripled their participation in the top executive ranks and
have also strongly improved their relative compensation, mostly by gaining representation into
the larger corporations. While the absence of a significant conditional gender gap implies that
women and men who hold similar jobs in firms of similar size receive fairly equal treatment in
terms of compensation, it does not rule out the possibility of discrimination in terms of gender
segregation or promotion.

Is executive compensation influenced by the composition of the Board of Directors? About one in
ten Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) is "reciprocally interlocked" with another CEO -- a current or
retired CEO of firm A serves as a director of firm B and a current or retired CEO of firm B serves as
a director of firm A. An even larger fraction (20%) of firms have at least one current or retired
employee sitting on the board of another firm and vice versa, which is larger than would be expected if
directors were randomly assigned to board positions. I investigate how these and other features of board
composition affect CEO pay. I use a newly assembled sample of nearly 10,000 director positions in
America’s largest companies, collected from annual reports, together with information on firm value,
recent stock returns, and other determinants of CEO salary. Chief executives heading interlocked firms
earn significantly higher compensation. After controlling for firm and CEO characteristics, however,
interlocking directorates are associated with at most 10% higher pay. Furthermore, there is some
evidence that this return is getting smaller over time.

We study the reaction of stock prices to announcements of reductions in force
(RIFs) using a sample of nearly 3878 such announcements in 1176 large firms during the
1970-97 period collected from the Wall Street Journal Index. We note that, although
there has been a dramatic secular increase in news stories related to job loss, the total
number of actual announcements for the firms in our sample follows the business cycle
quite closely. We then examine changes over time in standard summary statistics (means,
medians, fraction negative) of the distribution of stock market reactions as well as changes
over time in kernel density estimates of this distribution. We find clear evidence that the
distribution of stock market reactions has shifted to the right (became less negative) over
time. One possible explanation for this change is that, over the last three decades, RIFs
designed to improve efficiency have become more common relative to RIFs designed to
cope with reductions in product demand. We find that, although this explanation shows
some promise, most of the decline in the negative average stock price reaction remains
unexplained.

We report preliminary results of an analysis of the reaction of stock prices to
announcements of reductions in force (RIFs) using a large sample of such announcements
during the 1970-1997 period collected from the Wall Street Journal index. We find some
evidence that the stock market reaction to the announcement of RIFs has become less
negative over this period. While a complete understanding of the underlying causes of
this finding awaits further research, one possible interpretation is that, over the last three
decades, RIF s designed to improve efiiciency have become more common relative to RIFs
designed to cope with reductions in product demand.