2026 ECGI Finance Prize Winners in conversation with Nadya Malenko
The 2026 ECGI Finance Prize sponsored by WRDS for the Best Paper in the ECGI Finance Working Paper Series has been awarded to Jason Chen (Auburn University), Jakub Hajda (HEC Montréal) and Joseph Kalmenovitz (University of Rochester) for their paper: “Escaping Pay-for-Performance” (ECGI Finance Working Paper 1055/2025).
Finance Series Editor, Nadya Malenko (Boston College) interviews Joseph Kalmenovitz on the prize paper.
Selected by the Working Paper Series Finance Editorial Board, the paper contributes to the literature on incentive design and corporate governance by studying the compensation of the top executives of the federal government who lead regulatory agencies overseeing firms and financial markets. It shows how the structure of executive pay can simultaneously affect effort, career choices, and the composition of the leadership responsible for monitoring firms. In doing so, it extends core governance questions about executive compensation and incentives beyond firms to the public-sector executives responsible for overseeing them.
