Knowledge that Transforms

We examine how adverse selection problems when hiring new external CEOs affect contractual features of inducement grants. Focusing on the sensitivity of inducement grants to the new CEO announcement return ($ Sensitivity ), we find that firms provide inducement grants that are more sensitive to the new CEO announcement return when information asymmetry about the new CEO is more severe and the costs of adverse selection problems are higher. We also find a positive relation between the market reaction to the appointment and $ Sensitivity . We consider factors that reduce information asymmetry (e.g., engaging a search firm or appointing internal CEOs) and find they are associated with lower sensitivity of the inducement grant to the announcement.

Using data from China, we examine whether and how the incentive to boost GDP growth at the government level affects earnings management at the firm level. We find that firms in provinces with GDP growth lower than the national level or the average of the adjacent provinces are more likely to engage in earnings management than firms in other provinces. Specifically, they are more likely to inflate revenues, overproduce, and delay asset impairment losses. The aggregate earnings management induced by GDP growth incentives accounts for about 0.5% of GDP. The results are stronger for local state-owned enterprises, in provinces with a lower level of marketization, for firms in provinces with younger governors, and in the years immediately prior to the turnover of provincial officials. Overall, this paper provides systematic evidence on how firms engage in earnings management to boost the GDP growth in their provinces.

Stock-based compensation (SBC) reduces the value of shareholder equity, ceteris paribus, and is a significant and growing expense for many firms. Despite its valuation implications and its growing importance, anecdotal evidence suggests that market participants ignore SBC in valuation. We first find that firms with higher SBC exhibit both higher valuation ratios and lower returns, suggesting overvaluation. This pattern is stronger for firms with larger analyst coverage, implying that the sell-side optimism is an important driver of the overvaluation. We then examine how financial analysts treat SBC in their valuation models. We find that analysts exclude more expenses in their street earnings forecasts and provide more optimistically biased target prices for firms with higher SBC. A hand-collected sample of analyst reports indicates that analysts who ignore SBC in valuation derive optimistically biased price targets, whereas analysts who treat SBC as an expense are unbiased on average. Together, our evidence indicates that market participants’ failure to account for stock-based compensation as an expense leads to the overvaluation of equity.