Thomas et alia on CEO Employment Contracts and Arbitration

When Do CEOs Bargain for Arbitration?: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, by Randall S. Thomas,
Vanderbilt University - School of Law; Vanderbilt University - Owen Graduate School of Management; Erin A. O'Hara, Vanderbilt University School of Law, and Kenneth J. Martin, New Mexico State University - Department of Finance & Business Law, was recently posted on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

In this paper, we ask whether CEOs bargain to include binding arbitration provisions in their employment contracts. After exploring the theoretical arguments for and against including such provisions in these agreements, we use a large sample of CEO employment contracts to test the several different hypotheses for including such provisions. We find that only about one half of CEO employment contracts in our sample include such provisions. We further find that CEOs that receive a higher percentage of long term incentive pay as a fraction of their total pay, that work in industry sectors that are undergoing greater amounts of change, and that have lower long term profitability are statistically significantly more likely to have arbitration provisions in their employment contracts.