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nus 44 of about two cents. We also estimate the CEO wealth consequences associated with salary revisions,outstanding stock options, and performancerelated dismissals。 our upperbound estimate of the total change in the CEO’s wealth from these sources that are under direct control of the board of directors is about 75162。 per $1,000 change in shareholder wealth. Stock ownership is another way an executive’s wealth varies with the value of the firm. In our sample CEOs hold a median of about percent of their firms’ mon stock, including exercisable stock options and shares held by family members or connected trusts. Thus the value of the stock owned by the median CEO changes by $ the value of the firm changes by$1,our final all inclusive estimate of the payperformance sensitivity—including pensation Dismissal, and stockholdings—is about $ per $1,000 change in shareholder wealth. In large firms CEOs tend to own less stock and have less pensationbased incentives than CEOs in smaller firms. In particular, our allinclusive estimate of the payperformance sensitivity for CEOs in firms in the top half of our sample (ranked by market value) is $ per $1,000, pared to $ per $1,000 for CEOs in firms in the bottom half of our sample. We believe that our results are inconsistent with the implications of formal agency models of optimal contracting. The empirical relation between the pay of toplevel executives and firm performance, while positive and statistically significant, is small for an occupation in which incentive pay is expected to play an important role. In addition ,our estimates suggest that dismissals are not an important source of managerial incentives since the increases in dismissal probability due to poor performance and the penalties associated with dismissal are both small. Executive inside stock ownership can provide incentives, but these holdings are not generally controlled by the corporate board, and the majority of top executives have small personal stockholdings. Our results are consistent with several alternative hypotheses。 CEOs may be unimportant inputs in the production process, for example, or their actions may be easily monitored and evaluated by corporate boards. We offer an additional hypothesis relating to the role of political forces in the contracting process that implicitly regulate executive pensation by constraining the type of contracts that can be written between management and shareholders. These political forces, 44 operating both in the political sector and within anizations, appear to be important but are difficult to document because they operate in informal and indirect ways. Public disapproval of high rewards seems to have truncated the upper tail of the earnings distribution of corporate executives. Equilibrium in the managerial labor market then prohibits large penalties for poor perform