Michael Doran (Virginia; Google Scholar) presents Government Compensation And Company Governance (reviewed by Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar) right here) at Columbia at the moment as a part of its Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Coverage Colloquium hosted by David Schizer, Michael Love, Wojciech Kopczuk, and Alex Raskolnikov. 

Over the previous 4 many years, Congress has repeatedly used tax coverage to deal with executive-compensation practices, most notably by means of golden-parachute penalty taxes (enacted in 1984), a $1 million cap on compensation deductions (enacted in 1993 and expanded in 2017), and penalty taxes on nonqualified deferred compensation (enacted in 2004). The important assumptions underlying these efforts are, first, that sure options of govt pay characterize a failure of company governance and, second, that tax coverage can right that failure. The primary assumption might or might not be right; the theoretical and empirical arguments about it stay unresolved. However the second assumption is more and more untenable. Penalty taxes have been largely ineffective in altering executive-compensation practices within the ways in which legislators intend; in lots of cases, they really exacerbate the options of govt pay that concern Congress within the first place.