Knowledge that Transforms

We examine whether repricing underwater stock options reduces executive and overall employee turnover using a sample of firms that reprice stock options in 1998 and a sample of firms with underwater stock options that choose not to reprice. We find little evidence that repricing affects executive turnover. However, using forfeited stock options to proxy for overall employee turnover, we find that 1999 employee turnover is negatively related to the 1998 repricing, suggesting that repricing helps prevent turnover due to underwater options. We find no evidence that the relation between turnover and repricing differs between high technology and nonhigh technology firms.

We posit that limited transparency of firms’ operations to outside investors increases demands on governance systems to alleviate moral hazard problems. We investigate how ownership concentration, directors’ and executive's incentives, and board structure vary with: (1) earnings timeliness, and (2) organizational complexity measured as geographic and/or product line diversification. We find that ownership concentration, directors’ and executives’ equity-based incentives, and outside directors’ reputations vary inversely with earnings timeliness, and that ownership concentration, and directors’ equity-based incentives increase with firm complexity. However, board size and the percentage of inside directors do not vary significantly with earnings timeliness or firm complexity.

This paper examines the shareholders’ perceptions of the costs and benefits associated with the use of pooling-of-interests. The paper focuses on the market's reaction to the SEC's adoption of SAB 96. This regulation-forced firms to chose between using pooling-of-interests and maintaining their share repurchase programs. Overall, the results suggest shareholders perceive there to be a net cost when managers choose to use pooling-of-interests. These findings should be of particular interest to regulators, practitioners and researchers.

We study management turnover for the top five executives in a sample of 443 large firms from 1993 through 1998. The rate of forced turnover for non-CEOs is at least as great as that for CEOs, but the sensitivity of turnover to firm performance is smaller for non-CEOs. The probability that a non-CEO leaves office is elevated around CEO dismissals, particularly when the replacement CEO is an outsider. Many dismissed executives obtain new employment, but on average their new positions are significantly inferior to their prior jobs. Labor market outcomes are related to past compensation and the circumstances around departure.

We examine how financial statement informativeness, analyst following, and news relate to the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. Corporations’ timely disclosures of value relevant information and information collection by outsiders reduce information asymmetry, limiting insiders’ ability to trade profitably on private information. We use the profitability and intensity of insider trades to proxy for information asymmetry. We find that increased analyst following is associated with reduced profitability of insider trades and reduced insider purchases. Financial statement informativeness is negatively associated with the frequency of insider purchases. However, company news, good or bad, is positively associated with insider purchase frequency.