Knowledge that Transforms

I explore CEOs’ incentives to select firm strategies and to acquire firm-specific skills when CEOs have job-hopping opportunities. Several features of managerial compensation, such as benchmarking of pay to larger and more prestigious companies, payments unrelated to past performance, unrestricted stock awards for highly paid CEOs, long-term incentives, and higher pay in companies granting long-term incentives, emerge in the optimal contract. I argue that the model can explain the change in the structure and the surge in US CEO compensation as well as differences across countries and across firms within a country.

We analyze the demand for hedging and insurance by a firm facing cash-flow risks. We study how the firm’s liquidity management policy interacts with two types of risk: a Brownian risk that can be hedged through a financial derivative, and a Poisson risk that can be insured by an insurance contract. We find that the patterns of insurance and hedging decisions are pole apart: cash-poor firms should hedge but not insure, whereas the opposite is true for cash-rich firms. We also find non-monotonic effects of profitability. This may explain the mixed findings of empirical studies on corporate demand for hedging and insurance.

We examine the firm- and country-level determinants of foreign currency borrowing by small firms, using information on the most recent loan extended to 3101 firms in 25 transition countries between 2002 and 2005. Our results suggest that foreign currency borrowing is much stronger related to firm-level foreign currency revenues than it is to country-level interest rate differentials. Supporting the conclusion that carry-trade behavior is not the key driver of foreign currency borrowing in our sample we find no evidence that firm-level indicators of distress costs or financial transparency affect loan currency denomination. Overall, our findings suggest that retail clients which do take foreign currency loans are better equipped to bear the corresponding currency risks than is commonly thought. Policy makers should therefore take a closer look at the characteristics of borrowers before implementing regulations which are aimed at curbing foreign currency loans.

Recent empirical findings by Elsas, 2005, Degryse and Ongena, 2007 document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending which cannot be easily accommodated by the investment and strategic theories of bank lending orientation. In this paper, we suggest that this non-monotonicity can be explained by looking at the organizational structure of local credit markets. We provide evidence that marginal increases in interbank competition are detrimental to relationship lending in markets where large and out-of-market banks are predominant. By contrast, where relational lending technologies are already widely in use in the market by a large group of small mutual banks, an increase in competition may drive banks to further cultivate their extensive ties with customers.

The most recently issued, on-the-run, Treasuries are extremely liquid and frequently trade at a premium in both the cash and repo, or financing, markets. Previous research suggests that both the cash and repo premiums reflect demand from buy-and-hold investors who value the superior liquidity of these securities and are reluctant to lend them in the repo market. We find evidence that premiums in the repo market are also closely related to market participants’ demand to hedge interest rate risk associated with their holdings of fixed income securities.

The extent to which conglomerates face frictions in external capital markets has implications for their internal capital allocation. We find that, during recessions, when external financing costs are higher, conglomerates improve the efficiency of internal capital markets by increasing the allocation of funds to high q divisions relative to low q divisions. The improvement is significantly higher for conglomerates that are likely to face more binding financial constraints. This evidence suggests that although financial constraints impair managers’ ability to undertake positive net present value projects, they improve the quality of project selection by reducing free cash flow and pressuring managers to fund the more valuable investment opportunities. It is consistent with theories stressing the benefits of internal capital markets in the presence of external capital market imperfections.

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers have ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this literature – that a reduction in asymmetric information reduces the incidence of collateral. We exploit exogenous variation in lender information related to the adoption of an information technology that reduces ex ante private information, and compare collateral outcomes before and after adoption. Our results are consistent with this central implication of the private-information models and support the economic importance of this theory.

Signaling models contributed to the corporate finance literature by formalizing “the informational content of dividends” hypothesis. However, these models are under criticism as the empirical literature found weak evidences supporting a central prediction: the positive relationship between changes in dividends and changes in earnings. We claim that the failure to verify this prediction does not invalidate the signaling approach. The models developed up to now assume or derive utility functions with the single-crossing property. We show that, in the absence of this property, signaling is possible, and changes in dividends and changes in earnings can be positively or negatively related.

This paper demonstrates that non-voting shares can promote takeovers. When the bidder has private information, shareholders may refuse to tender because they suspect to sell at an ex post unfavourable price. The ensuing friction in the sale of cash flow rights can prevent an efficient change of control. Separating cash flow and voting rights alters the degree of cross-subsidization among bidder types. It can therefore be used as an instrument to promote takeover activity and to discriminate between efficient and inefficient bidders. The optimal fraction of non-voting shares decreases with managerial ability, implying an inverse relationship between firm value and non-voting shares.

Short sale constraints prior to seasoned equity offers, imposed by Rule 10b-21 in 1988, are believed to compromise pricing efficiency and contribute to the large temporal increase in offer price discounting. This study provides additional insights by examining shelf-registered offers, which were exempt from pre-issue short sale constraints until 2004. The results suggest that pre-issue short sale constraints do not influence the level of discounting in seasoned equity offers. Moreover, this study reports that the recent temporal increase in discounting is due to a greater prevalence of overnight shelf offers, which are associated with relatively large offer price discounts.