Knowledge that Transforms

We investigate simultaneously the impact of promotion-based tournament incentives for VPs and equity-based (alignment) incentives for VPs and the chief executive officer (CEO) on firm performance. We find that tournament incentives, as measured by the pay differential between the CEO and VPs, relate positively to firm performance. The relation is more positive when the CEO nears retirement and less positive when the firm has a new CEO, and weakens further when the new CEO is an outsider. Our analysis is robust to corrections for endogeneity of all our incentive measures and to several alternative measures of tournament incentives and firm performance.

Business connections can mitigate agency conflicts by facilitating efficient information transfers, but can also be channels for inefficient favoritism. I analyze these two effects in the mutual fund industry and find that fund directors and advisory firms that manage the funds hire each other preferentially based on the intensity of their past interactions. I do not find evidence that stronger board-advisor ties correspond to better or worse outcomes for fund shareholders. These results suggest that the two effects of board-management connections on investor welfare—improved monitoring and increased potential for collusion—balance out in this setting.

We examine whether differences in legal protection affect the size, maturity, and interest rate spread on loans to borrowers in 48 countries. Results show that banks respond to poor enforceability of contracts by reducing loan amounts, shortening loan maturities, and increasing loan spreads. These effects are both statistically significant and economically large. While stronger creditor rights reduce spreads, they do not seem to matter for loan size and maturity. Overall, we show that variation in enforceability of contracts matters a great deal more to how loans are structured and how they are priced.

We examine a wide range of two-date economies populated by heterogeneous agents with the most common forms of nonexpected utility preferences used in finance and macroeconomics. We demonstrate that the risk premium and the risk-free rate in these models are sensitive to ignoring heterogeneity. This follows because of endogenous withdrawal by nonexpected utility agents from the market for the risky asset. This finding is important precisely because these alternative preferences have frequently been proposed as possible resolutions to various asset pricing puzzles, and they have all been examined exclusively in a representative agent framework.

This paper analyzes how blockholders can exert governance even if they cannot intervene in a firm's operations. Blockholders have strong incentives to monitor the firm's fundamental value because they can sell their stakes upon negative information. By trading on private information (following the “Wall Street Rule”), they cause prices to reflect fundamental value rather than current earnings. This in turn encourages managers to invest for long-run growth rather than short-term profits. Contrary to the view that the U.S.'s liquid markets and transient shareholders exacerbate myopia, I show that they can encourage investment by impounding its effects into prices.

This paper investigates how a foreign firm's decision to cross‐list on a U.S. stock exchange is related to the consumption of private benefits of control by its controlling shareholders. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to choose to cross‐list in the United States because of constraints on the consumption of private benefits resulting from such listings. Using several proxies for private benefits related to the control and cash flow ownership rights of controlling shareholders, we find support for this hypothesis with a sample of more than 4,000 firms from 31 countries.

Using a sample of U.S. dual-class companies, we examine how divergence between insider voting and cash flow rights affects managerial extraction of private benefits of control. We find that as this divergence widens, corporate cash holdings are worth less to outside shareholders, CEOs receive higher compensation, managers make shareholder value-destroying acquisitions more often, and capital expenditures contribute less to shareholder value. These findings support the agency hypothesis that managers with greater excess control rights over cash flow rights are more prone to pursue private benefits at shareholders’ expense, and help explain why firm value is decreasing in insider excess control rights.

We explore a new channel for attracting inflows using a unique data set of corporate 401(k) retirement plans and their mutual fund family trustees. Families secure substantial inflows by being named trustee. We find that family trustees significantly overweight, and are reluctant to sell, their 401(k) client firm's stock. Trustee overweighting is more pronounced when the relationship is more valuable to the trustee family, and is concentrated in those funds receiving the greatest benefit from the inflows. We quantify this flow benefit and find that inclusion in the 401(k) plan has an economically and statistically large, positive effect on inflows.

Using a large sample of director elections, we document that shareholder votes are significantly related to firm performance, governance, director performance, and voting mechanisms. However, most variables, except meeting attendance and ISS recommendations, have little economic impact on shareholder votes—even poorly performing directors and firms typically receive over 90% of votes cast. Nevertheless, fewer votes lead to lower “abnormal” CEO compensation and a higher probability of removing poison pills, classified boards, and CEOs. Meanwhile, director votes have little impact on election outcomes, firm performance, or director reputation. These results provide important benchmarks for the current debate on election reforms.

I link an asset's risk premium to two characteristics of its underlying cash flow: covariance and duration. Using empirically novel estimates of both cash flow characteristics based exclusively on accounting earnings and aggregate consumption data, I examine their dynamic interaction in a two‐factor cash flow model and find that they are able to explain up to 82% of the cross‐sectional variation in the average returns on size, book‐to‐market, and long‐term reversal‐sorted portfolios for the period 1964 to 2002. This finding highlights the importance of fundamental cash flow characteristics in determining the risk exposure of an asset.