We find evidence that labor unions affect chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. First, we find that firms with strong unions pay their CEOs less. The negative effect is robust to various tests for endogeneity, including cross-sectional variations and a regression discontinuity design. Second, we find that CEO compensation is curbed before union contract negotiations, especially when the compensation is discretionary and the unions have a strong bargaining position. Third, we report that curbing CEO compensation mitigates the chance of a labor strike, thus providing a rationale for firms to pay CEOs less when facing strong unions.
We study the relation of asymmetric pricing with operating performance and stock returns of U.S. airlines. We construct two proxies to measure the degree of asymmetric pricing: Degree of Asymmetry (DOA) and Peer-adjusted DOA, and then simultaneously test how the direction and magnitude of asymmetric pricing affect airline performance. We find that raising air ticket price, regardless of whether the fuel cost is increasing or decreasing, is associated with significantly higher sales growth and stock returns than reducing price in the same scenario. However, raising price above industry peers is two-edged: it may increase profit margin, but at the cost of a slowdown in sales growth.
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