This paper connects executive compensation with hedging and analyzes a crucial shareholders and managers agency source that evolves from the pricing of the hedging device. The shareholders are risk-neutral, while the risk-averse manager hedges the price risk of the manufactured quantity, and his compensation package includes equity-linked compensation-stock grants. Only when the hedging instrument's pricing includes a risk premium, hedging is costly to the shareholders, while it is costless to the manager. Then from the owners' point of view, we observe managerial over-hedging, increasing in the equity-linked compensation level. This result leads to a violation of the classical production and hedging separation theorem. We conclude that, in the case where the hedging device's pricing bears a risk premium, shareholders can regulate the corporate value diversion to managers through diminishing the managerial equity-linked compensation scheme or by putting restrictions on the extent of hedging activities of executives.

We exploit a quasi-experimental setting in India to empirically demonstrate that non-discretionary allocation of book-building initial public offering (IPO) shares incentivizes institutional investors to understate the value of IPO shares in the primary market, so they can acquire shares at a lower price in the secondary market. Our IPO underpricing framework, which disentangles the effect of institutional investors’ incentive—associated with allocation policy, from the effect of underwriters’ risk—associated with underwriting contract, demonstrates that underpricing in book-building IPOs underwritten with firm-commitment contracts in India is higher in the post-September 2005 non-discretionary allocation investor protection period, than in the pre-September 2005 discretionary allocation period. Conversely, underpricing in fixed-price IPOs underwritten with firm-commitment contracts is lower in the post-September 2005 investor protection period than in the pre-September 2005 period. Overall, our findings, which are robust to endogneity concerns, reveal a policy tradeoff between information production and investor protection.