Compensation contracts including incentive instruments not only provide executives with positive incentives to increase shareholder wealth, but also create a negative value-dilution effect for existing shareholders. This study investigates this dilemma by conducting a benefit-cost analysis under a proposed structural form valuation framework. Our design mechanism shows that, given their firms’ current capital structure, shareholders are always capable of designing an optimal compensation contract to maximize their wealth. Due to the different research issue and assumptions, unlike findings of most previous studies, our model proposes that in a firm with a higher leverage ratio shareholders should provide a contract with higher incentive intensity for managers, and this proposition is supported by the empirical analyses which examine the sample of S&P index firms over the period 1992–2006 after adopting an updated fixed effects model.

Recent evidence shows that option volatility skews and volatility spreads between call and put options predict equity returns. This study investigates whether such predictive ability is driven by option traders’ information advantage. We examine the predictive ability of volatility skews and volatility spreads around significant information events including earnings announcements, other firm‐specific information events, and events that trigger significant market reactions. Consistent with option traders having an information advantage relative to equity traders before information events, we find that the option measures immediately before these events have higher predictive ability for short‐term event returns than they do in a more dated window or before a randomly selected pseudo‐event. We also find that option measures have predictive ability after information events. However, this predictive ability holds only for unscheduled corporate announcements, which suggests that, relative to equity traders, option traders have superior ability to process less anticipated information.

Many firms define their fiscal quarters as 13-week periods so that each fiscal year contains 52 weeks, which leaves out one or two day(s) a year. To compensate, one extra week is added every fifth or sixth year and, consequently, one quarter therein comprises 14 weeks. We find evidence of predictable forecast errors and stock returns in 14-week quarters, suggesting that analysts and investors do not, on average, adjust their expectations for the extra week. The ease with which 14-week quarters can be predicted, and expectations adjusted, suggests a surprising lack of effort on the part of analysts and investors.

We examine how strategic interaction in an industry influences the earnings expectations of financial analysts with regard to new product strategies. We find that following announcement of new products, analysts revise earnings forecasts upward more for announcing firms competing in low-strategic interaction industries than for firms competing in high-strategic interaction industries. For value-enhancing (value-reducing) product strategies, earnings forecast revisions are more favorable for rivals competing under a high (low) degree of strategic interaction than for rivals competing under a low (high) degree of strategic interaction. Overall empirical evidence indicates that the nature of strategic competition within the industry is important in assessing the market expectations of earnings for new product announcers and their rivals.