Management, directly or indirectly, learns from its firm's stock price, so a more informative stock price should make the firm more productive. We show that stock price informativeness increases firm productivity. We provide direct evidence of one channel through which stock price informativeness affects productivity; specifically, we find that CEO turnover is less sensitive to Tobin's q when informativeness is lower. We predict and confirm that the productivity of smaller and younger firms, better governed firms, more specialized firms, and firms with more competition is more strongly related to the informativeness of their stock price. We further address endogeneity concerns with the use of brokerage closures, S&P 500 additions, and mutual fund redemptions as plausibly exogenous events.

Using a large data set of performance goals employed in executive incentive contracts, we find that a disproportionately large number of firms exceed their goals by a small margin as compared to the number that fall short of the goal by a similar margin. This asymmetry is particularly acute for earnings goals, when compensation is contingent on a single goal, when the pay-performance relationship around the goal is concave-shaped, and for grants with non-equity-based payouts. Firms that exceed their compensation target by a small margin are more likely to beat the target the next period and CEOs of firms that miss their targets are more likely to experience a forced turnover. Firms that just exceed their Earnings Per Share (EPS) goals have higher abnormal accruals and lower Research and Development (R&D) expenditures, and firms that just exceed their profit goals have lower Selling, General and Administrative (SG&A) expenditures. Overall, our results highlight some of the costs of linking managerial compensation to specific compensation targets.