Are Perks Purely Managerial Excess?

We are grateful to Katie Donohue for assistance in data collection on perquisites and to Severin Borenstein for the airline data, and we would like to thank both for helpful comments. We also would like to thank Carliss Baldwin, Wayne Guay, Charlie Himmelberg, Ulrike Malmendier, Bob Inman, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Paul Oyer, Reed Shuldiner, Adrian Tschoegl, Premal Vora, Joel Waldfogel, David Yermack, Peter Zemsky, an anonymous referee, and seminar participants at the NBER Corporate Finance Summer Institute, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, Harvard Business School Strategy Conference, Harvard Business School Seminar, University of Minnesota, Philadelphia Federal Reserve, University of Chicago, and Wharton. Wulf acknowledges research support from the Reginald H. Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy and Organization at the Wharton School and Rajan thanks the National Science Foundation for research support. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• May 11, 2004