Download or read book Tournament Incentives Vs Equity Incentives of CFOs written by Feng Han and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of two essays on CFOs' promotion-based tournament incentives and performance-based equity incentives. The first essay examines the joint implications of CFOs' tournament incentives and equity incentives for firms' risk-taking. With the pay gap between the CEO and the CFO as the proxy for the CFO's tournament incentives, I find that the relationship between a firm's risk taking and the CFO's tournament incentives is non-monotonic. In particular, I show that below a certain level, increase in pay gap is associated with increase in firm risk taking (e.g., higher leverage, lower cash holding balance and higher R&D intensity). However, after reaching a certain level, the CEO-CFO pay gap negatively impacts risk-taking, as increase in pay gap is associated with lower leverage, higher cash holding balance and lower R&D intensity. With the CFO's pay-performance sensitivity as the proxy for the CFO's equity incentives, I find that the CFO's equity incentives negatively impact firm's R&D intensity, but have no significant impact on broader financial decisions such as capital structure and cash policy. Collectively, my findings indicate that CFO incentives play an important role in firm's risk-taking behaviors, and the effect of the CFO's tournament incentives is more pronounced. The second essay studies the impact of tournament incentives and equity incentives for CFOs on firms' earnings management, including accrual-based earnings management (e.g., total accruals, abnormal accruals) and real activities manipulation (e.g., abnormal discretionary expenditures, abnormal production costs). Measuring the CFO's tournament incentives as the pay gap between the CEO and the CFO, I show that the CFO's tournament incentives positively influence total accruals and abnormal accruals. Meanwhile, the CFO's equity incentives, measured as the CFO's pay-performance sensitivity, are found positively related to real activities manipulation proxies and total accruals. My findings show a consistent pattern before and after the passage of SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002), but the incentives' effects on earnings management have become less significant in the post-SOX period. Overall, the CFOs' tournament and equity incentives both play an important role in earnings management, but their relative importance lies in different earnings management techniques.

Download or read book How Powerful CFOs Camouflage and Exploit Equity Based Incentive Compensation written by Denton Collins and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While numerous studies have examined the impact that powerful CEOs have on their compensation and overall firm decisions, relatively little is known about how powerful CFOs influence their compensation and important firm financial reporting and operational outcomes. This is somewhat surprising given the critical role CFOs play in the financial reporting process of a firm. Using managerial power theory (Bebchuk and Fried, 2003) and the theory of power and self-focus (Pitesa and Thau, 2013), we predict that powerful CFOs employ a two-part strategy to camouflage excessive incentive compensation above what efficient contracting would dictate. First, powerful CFOs use their power and influence to negotiate shorter incentive pay duration on a non-arm's length basis to maximize the present value of cash flows. Second, when their incentive equity compensation vests, we suggest that CFOs manage earnings to further enhance their personal income. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find higher levels of income-increasing accrual-based earnings management and real transactions management, a potentially unethical practice, in firms with powerful CFOs who have short pay durations. We discuss the implications of our analysis in the context of mitigating CFO power and managing the ethical environment “tone at the top.”

Download or read book Equity based Incentives and Shareholder Say on pay written by Denton Collins and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the relationship between CEO pay-performance sensitivity, pay-risk sensitivity, and shareholder voting outcomes as part of the "say-on-pay" provision of the 2010 U.S. Dodd-Frank Act. Consistent with our hypothesis, we provide evidence that shareholders tend to approve of compensation packages that are more sensitive to changes in stock price (pay-performance sensitivity). Our findings are consistent with theoretical predictions that outside owners approve of equity incentives as a means of aligning managers' interests with those of shareholders. We also document that future changes to equity-based incentives are related to voting outcomes and that shareholders incorporate CFO incentives into their votes. Collectively, these results provide evidence of the importance of equity-based incentives from the perspective of those most concerned with firm value and of the effectiveness of say-on-pay as a governance mechanism. Accepted by Journal of Business Finance and Accounting in January 2019.

Download or read book The Effect of Local Tournament Incentives on Firms Performance Risk Taking Decisions and Financial Reporting Decisions written by Matthew Ma and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study documents the existence of local employment preferences for corporate executives and examines how the compensation of executives' local peers affects their own performance, risk-taking decisions, and financial reporting decisions. We find that external hires of new CEOs (CFOs) are five (eight) times more likely to be from local firms than non-local firms. We also find that local tournament incentives--as proxied by the pay gap between an executive and higher-paid executives in the area--are associated with stronger performance, greater risk taking, and more financial misreporting. We find consistent results using a difference-in-difference analysis that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in local tournament incentives caused by the sudden death of a local CEO. Our findings are consistent with executives taking actions to compete for a promotion to a nearby firm with higher pay. In addition, we find the effect of local tournament incentives is larger when local mobility is greater and executives' local preferences are stronger.

Download or read book Essays In Executive Incentives written by Matthew Douglas Imes and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of three chapters which explores various aspects of executive incentives. In the first chapter, I examine the relation between executive equity pay and stock returns. By compensating CEOs and CFOs differently, shareholders can create incentive conflicts between the firms' top two managers that potentially affects shareholder wealth. On the one hand, incentive conflict potentially benefits shareholders by improving information exchange and establishing checks and balances in decisions made jointly by the CEO and CFO but alternatively, can harm shareholders by increasing risk through impeding the decision-making processes. I examine the relation between CEO-CFO incentive conflict and stock returns. The analysis indicates that an investor who routinely buy firms with the least incentive conflict and shorts firms with the greatest incentive conflict between CEO and CFOs will outperform the market by 475 basis points per year. I investigate whether risk, firm performance, or market inefficiency explain the excess returns and provide evidence that shareholders demand higher returns for bearing risk associated with CEO-CFO incentive similarities. Next, I explore the impact of executive incentives on bondholder wealth through looking at bond yields. Firms compensate managers to maximize shareholder value, yet these same incentives affect bondholder risk. I investigate the relation between executive equity pay and the cost of debt. My findings indicate a "u-shaped" relation between bond yields and equity pay. These results are consistent with the notion that bondholders prefer a moderate amount of executive equity pay and above or below that level, bondholders increase yields to protect their interests. Instrumenting equity pay using CEO heritage, I find support for a curvilinear relation. These findings suggest that moderate levels of equity pay mitigate the agency costs between firm shareholders and bondholders. Finally, I study the affect of board gender diversity on CEO and director compensation. Females occupy only about 12% of director positions on corporate boards. I find that boards with more female's onboard tend to give CEOs larger fractions of equity in their compensation packages while incentivizing directors with lower fractions of equity pay. This evidence is consistent with the notion that female board members are superior monitors yet also possess greater risk-aversion than male board members.

Download or read book The Incentives of Equity Based Compensation and Wealth written by Chris Armstrong and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study estimates chief executive officers' (CEO) subjective valuation of their equity holdings using their revealed preferences conveyed by their decisions to hold or exercise their stock options and to hold or sell their equity shares. Using a random utility framework, I find that the subjective value of equity holdings is associated with both economic and behavioral factors, and that the impact of these factors varies considerably across CEOs. In addition, I find that most CEOs value their equity holdings below the corresponding risk-neutral value, which provides new insight relative to prior literature that examines how insiders value equity-based compensation. This study also provides preliminary evidence regarding the relationship between the sensitivity of CEOs' subjective value of their equity holdings to changes in stock price (subjective delta) and volatility (subjective vega) and future operating performance, investment and financial risk, and stock price performance. The results frequently diverge from those of prior studies that examine the relationship between risk-neutral equity portfolio deltas and these future performance measures. Collectively, the results of this study highlight the complexity of measuring the equity incentives construct and suggest that an executive's subjective valuation of equity is a critical component.

Download or read book Rank Order Tournaments and Incentive Alignment written by Jayant R. Kale and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this article, we study the effectiveness of promotion-based tournament incentives. We simultaneously investigate tournament incentives for the VP and performance- or equity- based (alignment) incentives for the VP and the CEO. We find that tournament incentives, as measured by the pay differential between the CEO and VPs, relate positively to firm performance. We show that the effect of tournament incentives on firm performance is weaker when the firm has a new CEO and more so when the new CEO is an outsider, and when the firm belongs to a homogeneous industry. On the other hand, tournament effects are stronger when the CEO is close to retirement. Our analysis is robust to corrections for endogeneity of all our incentive measures as well for several alternate measures of tournament incentives and firm performance.

Download or read book Industry Tournament Incentives written by Jeffrey L. Coles and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We model and empirically assess industry tournament incentives for CEOs. The measures we develop for the tournament prize derive from the compensation gap between the CEO at her firm and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms. The model predicts that firm performance and risk increase in the external pay gap, with these incentive effects increasing in the probability of the executive winning the tournament. GMM-IV estimates indicate that the external, industry pay gap is reliably and positively associated with firm performance and risk and with the riskiness of investment and financial policy. The effect of the industry tournament incentive is stronger when empirical proxies indicate the probability of the executive winning is higher.

Download or read book Equity Incentives and Internal Control Weaknesses written by Steven Balsam and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, we examine whether the monetary incentives associated with equity ownership (broadly defined to include stock and stock options) induce managers to maintain strong internal controls. Supporting the notion that equity ownership provides management incentive to strengthen the company's internal controls we find that the likelihood of a material weakness in internal control decreases with increases in equity incentives. This result holds for both traditional regression analysis, as well as analysis conducted using propensity score matching. Further analysis suggests that these results are more closely related to company-level internal control problems, are more strongly associated with incentives provided by restricted equity, and are more highly correlated with CFO than CEO incentives.

Download or read book The Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Governance written by Benjamin Hermalin and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Governance, Volume One, covers all issues important to economists. It is organized around fundamental principles, whereas multidisciplinary books on corporate governance often concentrate on specific topics. Specific topics include Relevant Theory and Methods, Organizational Economic Models as They Pertain to Governance, Managerial Career Concerns, Assessment & Monitoring, and Signal Jamming, The Institutions and Practice of Governance, The Law and Economics of Governance, Takeovers, Buyouts, and the Market for Control, Executive Compensation, Dominant Shareholders, and more. Providing excellent overviews and summaries of extant research, this book presents advanced students in graduate programs with details and perspectives that other books overlook. Concentrates on underlying principles that change little, even as the empirical literature moves on Helps readers see corporate governance systems as interrelated or even intertwined external (country-level) and internal (firm-level) forces Reviews the methodological tools of the field (theory and empirical), the most relevant models, and the field’s substantive findings, all of which help point the way forward

Download or read book Pay Without Performance written by Lucian A. Bebchuk and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.

Download or read book Compensation Committee Handbook written by James F. Reda and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2004-10-27 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Second Edition provides a comprehensive review of the issues facing compensation committees and covers functional issues such as organising, planning, and best practice tips. Compliance advice on the implications of Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations is addressed along with new requirements on disclosures of financial transactions involving management and principal stockholders.

Download or read book Personnel Economics written by Edward P. Lazear and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text provides an introduction to personnel economics, showing how economists can make specific predictions and prescriptions for personnel issues that arise in business on a daily basis. The author focuses on compensation and its relation to worker motivation, selection and teamwork.

Download or read book A Practical Guide to Compensation Committee Service written by Eric Hosken and published by . This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compensation Committees are increasingly under external scrutiny with Say on Pay and the new threats of shareholder lawsuits related to Say on Pay. For new and incumbent Compensation Committee members, it is more important than ever that they get things "right". For many directors, service on the Compensation Committee may be somewhat foreign to them. While they might have interacted with the Committee occasionally as an executive, it is unlikely that Compensation was a primary area of their focus. In order to help Committee members learn from the experience of others, we have developed this guide to address key aspects of Compensation Committee service. The guide has been developed based on interviews with current and former Compensation Committee chairs at major U.S. public companies, as well as over 100 years of combined experience as consultants advising Compensation Committees on all aspects of executive and director compensation.The focus of this guide is not on the technical aspects of Executive Compensation design. Instead, our emphasis is on understanding how effective Compensation Committees structure their activities to effectively address their responsibilities. Not all effective Compensation Committees use the same process or approach, but there are key characteristics that they share. In each chapter, we will reference real experiences from our interviews and our experiences as advisors to illustrate what Committees need to do and need to avoid to get it "right".

Download or read book Competition Culture and Corporate Finance written by Terry Harris and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces a measure of firms’ competition culture based on a textual analysis and natural language processing (NPL) of firms’ 10-K filings. Using this measure, the book explores the relationship between competition culture and various phenomena in corporate finance, specifically, institutional ownership structure, stock return performance, idiosyncratic stock price crash risk, meeting/beating analysts’ earnings expectations, and earnings management activity, for a large sample of US-based financial and non-financial firms. In particular, the book provides evidence that transient institutional ownership intensifies firms’ competition culture, while dedicated institutional ownership lessens it. In addition, the book’s findings suggest that firms with greater levels of competition culture achieve higher levels of short-term stock return performance, experience greater incidence of idiosyncratic stock price crashes, and are more prone to meet/beat analysts forecast and engage in accruals-based earnings manipulation. Finally, the book examines the role played by competition culture in financial firms (i.e., banks). Specifically, the book explores the effect of competition culture on bank lending and shows that banks with greater levels of competition culture are generally more prone to engage in procyclical lending activity. The findings of the book have significant policy implications and will be of interests to regulators, accounting standard-setters, managers and those charged with firm governance, career academics and researchers, graduates, and those generally interested in the role played by corporate culture in the related fields of finance, economics, and accounting.

Download or read book Regulating Competition in Stock Markets written by Lawrence R. Klein and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to curbing monopoly power in stock markets Engaging and informative, Regulating Competition in Stock Markets skillfully analyzes the impact of the recent global financial crisis on health and happiness, and uses this opportunity to put regulatory systems in perspective. Happiness is lost because of emotional and physical health deterioration resulting from the crisis. Therefore, the authors conclude that financial crisis prevention should be the focus of public policy. This book is the most comprehensive study so far on potential risks to the stock market, especially various forms of market manipulation that lead to mania and eventual crisis. Based on litigation cases from international stock markets, and borrowing multidisciplinary findings in the fields of finance, economics, accounting, media studies, criminology, legal studies, psychology, and medicine, this book is the first to provide thorough micro-level regulatory proposals rooted in financial reality. By focusing on securities trading, they apply antitrust measures to limiting monopolistic power that is used for the manipulation of investors' perception and monopolistic profit. These proposals are quantifiable, adjustable, inexpensive, and can be easily implemented by any securities regulating agency for real-time oversight and daily operations. The recommendations found here are intended to improve the fairness and transparency of the financial markets, thereby perfecting the market competition, protecting investors, stabilizing the market, and preventing crises Explores how avoiding crises can to contribute to a more scientific, health aware, and civilized economic and social development Written by a team of authors who have extensive experience in this dynamic field, including Nobel Laureate Lawrence R. Klein Since the founding of the first, organized stock exchange in Amsterdam 400 years ago, no systematic economic research results on stock markets have been implemented in stock market regulation around the world. Regulating Competition in Stock Markets aims to fill this void.

Download or read book A Practical Guide to SEC Proxy and Compensation Rules written by Amy L. Goodman and published by Wolters Kluwer. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 1856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Practical Guide to SEC Proxy and Compensation Rules, Fifth Edition is designed to meet the special needs of corporate officers and other professionals who must understand and master the latest changes in compensation disclosure and related party disclosure rules, including requirements and initial SEC implementing rules under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Current, comprehensive and reliable, the Guide prepares you to handle both common issues and unexpected situations. Contributions from the country's leading compensation and proxy experts analyze: Executive compensation tables Compensation disclosure and analysis Other proxy disclosure requirements E-proxy rules Executive compensation under IRC Section 162(m) And much more! Organized for quick, easy access to all the issues and areas youand’re likely to encounter in your daily work, A Practical Guide to SEC Proxy and Compensation Rules Dissects each compensation table individuallyand—the summary compensation table, the option and SAR tables, the long-term incentive plan tableand—and alerts you to the perils and pitfalls of each one Walks you through preparation of the Compensation Disclosure and Analysis Explains the latest interpretations under the SEC's shareholder proposal rule and institutional investor initiatives and what they mean for the coming proxy season Helps you tackle planning concerns that have arisen in the executive compensation context, including strategies for handling shareholder proposals regarding executive compensation and obtaining shareholder approval of stock option plans The Fifth Edition reflects the latest SEC and IRS regulations, guidance, interpretations and disclosure practices. It adds a new chapter focused on developments and practices relating to required public company and“say-on-payand” advisory votes pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Act. Another new chapter addresses director qualifications and Board leadership, diversity, and risk oversight disclosures. This one-volume guide will help you prepare required disclosures as well as make long-range plans that comply fully with regulations and positions taken by the SEC more quickly and completely than ever before. In addition, weand’ve updated the Appendices to bring you the latest rules and relevant primary source material.