Knowledge that Transforms

[This paper challenges the widely accepted stylized fact that chief executive officers (CEOs) in the United States are paid significantly more than their foreign counterparts. Using CEO pay data across fourteen countries with mandated pay disclosures, we show that the U.S. pay premium is economically modest and primarily reflects the performance-based pay demanded by institutional shareholders and independent boards. Indeed, we find no significant difference in either level of CEO pay or the use of equity-based pay between U.S. and non-U.S. firms exposed to international and U.S. capital, product, and labor markets. We also show that U.S. and non-U.S. CEO pay has largely converged in the 2000s.]

[I provide a revealed-preference-based framework that uses covenant prices and choices to quantitatively study how covenants generate firm benefits by completing debt contracts. I use a rational-expectations-based panel estimator of covenant prices, which does not require quasi-experimental variation, to circumvent the problem of endogenous covenant choices. I find that firms' surpluses exceed the spread paid on a loan. Leverage and interest-rate covenants produce the largest benefits, lending quantitative credence to several standard theories of covenants. Once covenants are chosen, the benefits from fine-tuning them are small, thus rationalizing "boilerplate" covenants. I conclude by discussing the extensions and limitations of my method.]

[Minority acquisitions, involving less than 50% of the target, represent a distinct organizational choice. Minority acquisition can mitigate some of the incentive problems that arise in contractual relationships. Less is known, however, about the trade-off between minority acquisitions and complete integration. We find that minority acquisitions are more common when keeping target managerial incentives intact is important and when the target is financially constrained or can benefit from certification. Minority acquisitions are also more likely when the target's valuation is especially uncertain; integrating internal capital markets will be costly; and consolidating earning will lower earnings per share (EPS).]

[I propose a new dynamic model of the firm that links operating leverage to both value premium and book-leverage premium in stock returns. Value firms are low-productivity firms with either high operating leverage or high financial leverage. Firms with high operating leverage maintain low book leverage ratios. When operating leverage is economically significant, both value firms and low book-leverage firms can have high equity risk premiums. In particular, value premium becomes positive while book-leverage premium becomes negative. Without operating leverage, the signs of these premiums are reversed. The model captures quantitatively several important properties of the cross-section of stock returns.]

[CEOs with large networks earn more than those with small networks. An additional connection to an executive or director outside the firm increases compensation by about $17,000 on average, more so for "important" members, such as CEOs of big firms. Pay-for-connectivity is unrelated to several measures of corporate governance, evidence in favor of an efficient contracting explanation for CEO pay.]

[Firms routinely justify CEO compensation by benchmarking against companies with highly paid CEOs. We examine whether the 2006 regulatory requirement of disclosing compensation peers mitigated firms' opportunistic peer selection activities. We find that strategic peer benchmarking did not disappear after enhanced disclosure. In fact, it intensified at firms with low institutional ownership, low director ownership, low CEO ownership, busy boards, large boards, and non-intensive monitoring boards, and at firms with shareholders complaining about compensation practices. The effect is also stronger at firms with new CEOs. These findings call into question whether disclosure regulation can remedy potential problems in compensation practices.]

[This paper examines whether unobservable differences in firm volatility are responsible for the global loan pricing puzzle, which is the observation that corporate loan interest rates appear to be lower in Europe than in the United States. We analyze whether equity volatility, an error prone measure of firm volatility, can explain this difference in loan spreads. We show that using equity volatility in OLS regressions will result in biased and inconsistent estimates of the difference in U.S. and European loan spreads. We use instrumental variable methods to identify consistent estimates and find no difference in U.S. and European loan spreads.]

[Convergence trades exploit temporary mispricing by simultaneously buying relatively underpriced assets and selling short relatively overpriced assets. This paper studies optimal convergence trades under both recurring and nonrecurring arbitrage opportunities represented by continuing and "stopped" cointegrated price processes and considers both fixed and stochastic (Poisson) horizons. Conventional long-short delta neutral strategies are generally suboptimal and it can be optimal to simultaneously go long (or short) in two mispriced assets. Optimal portfolio holdings critically depend on whether the risky asset position is liquidated when prices converge. Our theoretical results are illustrated on pairs of Chinese bank shares traded on both the Hong Kong and China stock exchanges.]

[A mortgage program that offered borrowers greater flexibility in the timing of repayments increased a bank's volume by over 35%. Loans in the program exhibited superior performance. Despite this, a regression discontinuity analysis shows that the causal impact of offering flexibility was to attract borrowers to the bank who experienced quadruple the average delinquency rate. These contrasting findings are driven by the fact that the bank engaged in ex post sorting of stronger borrowers into the flexible program. This sorting masked the ex ante adverse selection effects that offering flexibility had on the entire borrowing pool.]

[This paper derives and analyzes dynamic timing strategies of a fund manager with private information. Endogenous timing strategies generated by various information structures and skills, and associated fund styles, are identified. Endogenous fund returns are characterized in the public information of an uninformed observer. Timing components are identified. The paper provides foundations for regression analyses of fund returns and tests of market timing.]