Knowledge that Transforms

The thesis of this symposium, organized by James Bicksler, was that while finance theory will surely inform practitioners, it seems appropriate to pay some attention to the opposite flow: practitioners can inform theory. Contributors include a distinguished group of practitioners with extensive backgrounds in economics, and economists with extensive public policy experience: Martin Feldstein, Robert Glauber, David Mullins, and Steven Wallman. Their topics range from privatizing social security, to managing market crashes, to the regulatory agency cost problem, to regulatory constraints in a technologically advanced world.

This article investigates the claim that debt finance can increase firm value by curtailing managers' access to “free cash flow.” We first show that incentive contracts that tie the managers' pay to stockholder wealth are often a superior solution to the free cash flow problem. We then consider the possibility that the manager can trade on secondary capital markets. Liquid secondary markets are shown to undermine management incentive schemes and, in many cases, to restore the value of debt finance in controlling the free cash flow problem.

This article analyzes the timing of CEO stock option awards, as a method of investigating corporate managers' influence over the terms of their own compensation. In a sample of 620 stock option awards to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies between 1992 and 1994, I find that the timing of awards coincides with favorable movements in company stock prices. Patterns of companies' quarterly earnings announcements are consistent with an interpretation that CEOs receive stock option awards shortly before favorable corporate news. I evaluate and reject several alternative explanations of the results, including insider trading and the manipulation of news announcement dates.

We study a model where firms may possess free cash flow and takeovers may be disruptive. We show that the possibility of a takeover, combined with defensive mechanisms and the ability to pay greenmail, can solve the free cash flow problem in an efficient way. The payment of greenmail reveals information that generates a stock price decline that exceeds the value of the greenmail payment, even though the payment of greenmail is value maximizing. Optimal defensive measures limit takeover attempts if the target stock price is too low. We also provide cross-sectional implications of the analysis.

We examine the effect of segmented commodity markets on the relation between forward and future spot exchange rates in a dynamic economy. We calculate the slope coefficient in our theoretical economy from regressing exchange rate changes on forward premia. With reasonable parameter values, the slope coefficient is less than unity. However, even for extreme parameters the slope is not less than zero, as found in the data. A negative slope coefficient in a nominal version of the model requires the covariance between monetary shocks and relative output shocks to be significantly negative, in contrast to the covariance in the data.