Knowledge that Transforms

The Society for Financial Studies (SFS) is a global, nonprofit academic society in finance. It owns and runs three academic journals: (1) the Review of Asset Pricing Studies, (2) the Review of Corporate Finance Studies, and (3) the Review of Financial Studies. It also organizes two annual academic conferences: (1) the SFS Cavalcade Asia-Pacific and (2) the SFS Cavalcade North America. It also runs several smaller, specialized conferences and financially supports and co-sponsors other independent conferences. Its governing board is the SFS Council. SFS holds an annual membership meeting in May every year. At that meeting the SFS President, Executive Editors, Cavalcade Chair, and Secretary-Treasurer report on SFS activities. This year, for the first time, we have written up those reports and integrated them into this annual report of the Society for Financial Studies, which will be published in all three SFS journals. The reasons for doing this are to share this information more broadly with SFS members and friends and to create a permanent record for the long run (that is, institutional memory).

We analyze how 14, 000 top U.S. executives exercise their stock options. Factors suggested by existing theories have low or moderate explanatory power. Variables that model executives’ motive to diversify fare particularly poorly, whereas variables that capture reference-dependent preference, such as past highs and lows of stock prices, perform better. By contrast, characteristics of option portfolios are of first-order importance and suggest that managers have target ownership levels. Institutional features like vesting restrictions or blackout periods also have a first-order impact. We conclude that executives’ main motivations for exercising stock options early seem to be outside the scope of extant models. (JEL G30, M52)Received August 20, 2018; editorial decision December 28, 2019 by Editor Andrew Ellul.

I investigate whether restrictive loan covenants disrupt or improve firms’ operating performance. Using an instrumental variables approach to address the endogenous relationship between covenant strictness and firms’ efficiency, I find that stricter loan covenants lead to an increase in profitability and firm value even when firms do not violate a covenant. Stricter covenants improve performance only in firms with managerial agency conflicts: those without large shareholder ownership, facing softer competition in their product market, or with weaker shareholder rights. The evidence suggests that by designing stringent contracts ex ante, creditors create positive externalities in poorly governed firms through managerial incentives. Received December 7, 2018; editorial decision May 31, 2019 by Editor Uday Rajan.

We study tax and nontax incentives for corporate inversions in a hand-collected data set of 691 inversions out of 11 home countries into 45 host destinations over the 1996–2013 period. Even though lower tax rates generally attract inversions, only 2 of 5 firms invert into tax havens, and two-thirds of firms invert into host destinations with lower statutory tax rates than those faced at home. Moreover, firms invert to geographically close destinations with similar governance standards. Using staggered country-pair-level policy changes as experiments, we find that host-country governance may explain why not all firms invert. Received December 6, 2018; Editorial decision August 12, 2019 by Editor Andrew Ellul.

We examine the relative importance of observed and unobserved firm- and manager-specific heterogeneities in determining executive compensation incentives and firm policy, risk, and performance. First, we decompose executive incentives into time-variant and time-invariant firm and manager components. Manager fixed effects supply 73% (60%) of explained variation in delta (vega). Second, controlling for manager fixed effects alters parameter estimates and corresponding inference on observed firm and manager characteristics. Third, larger CEO delta (vega) fixed effects predict better firm performance (riskier corporate policies and higher firm risk). These results suggest that the delta (vega) fixed effect captures managerial ability (risk aversion). (JEL G3, G32, G34, J24, J31, J33) Received September 7, 2018; editorial decision February 21, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul.

We investigate the influence of simultaneous equity holdings by creditors (dual holders) on investment efficiency. Such creditors have stronger incentives and power to monitor firm investment as they have cash flow and control rights from both debt and equity sides. We provide evidence that dual holders, particularly noncommercial bank dual holders, significantly mitigate overinvestment. For high growth firms and those subject to debt overhang, dual holders also alleviate underinvestment. Equity value increases at the presence of dual holders. Our results indicate that by improving firm investment efficiency, dual holders not only make creditor investments safer but also create value for shareholders. Received March 26, 2019; editorial decision September 17, 2019 by Editor Isil Erel.