We provide evidence that the use of discretionary accruals to manipulate reported earnings is more pronounced at firms where the CEO's potential total compensation is more closely tied to the value of stock and option holdings. In addition, during years of high accruals, CEOs exercise unusually large amounts of options and CEOs and other insiders sell large quantities of shares. JEL Classification: G3; M4

We present an economic model of systemic risk in which undercapitalization of the financial sector as a whole is assumed to harm the real economy, leading to a systemic risk externality. Each financial institution's contribution to systemic risk can be measured as its systemic expected shortfall (SES ), that is, its propensity to be undercapitalized when the system as a whole is undercapitalized. SES increases in the institution's leverage and its marginal expected shortfall (MES ), that is, its losses in the tail of the system's loss distribution. We demonstrate empirically the ability of components of SES to predict emerging systemic risk during the financial crisis of 2007-2009.We would like to thank Rob Engle for many useful discussions. We are grateful to Christian Brownlees, Farhang Farazmand, Hanh Le and Tianyue Ruan for excellent research assistance. We also received useful comments from Tobias Adrian, Mark Carey, Matthias Drehman, Dale Gray and Jabonn Kim (discussants), Andrew Karolyi (editor), and seminar participants at several central banks and universities where the current paper and related systemic risk rankings at vlab.stern.nyu.edu/welcome/risk have been presented. Pedersen gratefully acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC grant no. 312417) and the FRIC Center for Financial Frictions (grant no. DNRF102).

We document that the recent decline in aggregate volatility has been accompanied by a large increase in firm level risk. The negative relationship between firm and aggregate risk seems to be present across industries in the US, and across OECD countries. Firm volatility increases after deregulation. Firm volatility is linked to research and development spending as well as access to external financing. Further, R&D intensity is also associated with lower correlation of sectoral growth with the rest of the economy.Paper Written for the NBER's Twentieth Annual Conference on Macroeconomics * We thank Ted Rosenbaum for excellent research assisstance. We are grateful to Mark Gertler and Ken Rogoff for their suggestions, to Janice Eberly and Daron Acemoglu for their insightful discussions, and to the participants of the 2005 NBER conference on macroeconomics for their comments.

We study the allocation and compensation of human capital in the U.S. finance industry over the past century. Across time, space, and subsectors, we find that financial deregulation is associated with skill intensity, job complexity, and high wages for finance employees. All three measures are high before 1940 and after 1985, but not in the interim period. Workers in finance earn the same education-adjusted wages as other workers until 1990, but by 2006 the premium is 50% on average. Top executive compensation in finance follows the same pattern and timing, where the premium reaches 250%. Similar results hold for other top earners in finance. Changes in earnings risk can explain about one half of the increase in the average premium; changes in the size distribution of firms can explain about one fifth of the premium for executives.

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again after 1980; (ii) most of these variations can be explained by corresponding changes in the quantity of intermediated assets (equity, household and corporate debt, liquidity); (iii) intermediation has constant returns to scale and an annual cost of 1.5–2 percent of intermediated assets; (iv) secular changes in the characteristics of firms and households are quantitatively important. (JEL D24, E44, G21, G32, N22)