The optimal contract between managers and investors is endogenously derived when managers have preferences for both monetary compensation and corporate resources under their control. When the optimal payout is privately known to managers, they can be induced to make payouts by linking their compensation to the payout. Public equity is a claim on this discretionary payout. If investors can obtain new information about the firm's optimal payout level, it can be utilized by transferring the control from management to investors. The new information allows the firm to achieve a more efficient allocation through recontracting. We show that the new information will be obtained if and only if the payout falls below a promised level. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

Journal Article International Comparison of Demand for Imports Get access Tse Chun Chang Tse Chun Chang Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 13, Issue 2, 1945, Pages 53–67, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296036 Published: 01 September 1945

ABSTRACT The ex ante optimal contract between investors and employees is derived endogenously and is interpreted in terms of debt, equity, and employees' compensation. Although public equity financing is feasible in this model through verified accounting income, debt is needed to force value‐enhancing restructuring before the income realizes. The optimal debt level, however, is lower than that which maximizes the value of the firm when there is nonmonetary restructuring‐related cost to employees. The paper explains how stock prices react to exchange offers, how earnings can be diluted by a decrease in leverage, and why employees' claims are generally senior to those of investors. New testable implications about leverage and compensation levels are derived.

Investors who possess information about the value of an IPO can participate in the offering as well as trade strategically in the aftermarket. Both the bookbuilding and the fixed price IPO selling methods require more underpricing when aftermarket trading by informed investors is considered. Bookbuilding becomes especially costly, since the potential for profit in the aftermarket adversely affects investors' bidding behavior in the premarket. Unless the underwriter can restrict its bookbuilding effort to a small enough subset of the informed investors, a fixed price strategy that allocates the issue to retail investors produces higher proceeds on average, contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature. We therefore find a benefit to limiting access to the premarket and, hence, provide an efficiency rationale for the practice by American bankers of marketing IPOs to a select group of investors. We also provide unique policy and empirical implications.

This article investigates how human capital investment, labor turnover, and wages are jointly determined when the current employer knows more about a worker's productivity than potential employers. Results derived are quite different from, or unexplored by, the standard human capital theory. The authors show that the information asymmetry can cause an externality distortion in human capital investment because higher productivity due to the investment may not be recognized by the market. The investment level increases in the degree of firm specificity of human capital. The underinvestment problem is more severe when human capital is general than when it is firm-specific. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.

Polynomial goal programming, in which investor preferences for skewness can be incorporated, is utilized to determine the optimal portfolio from Latin American, US and European capital markets. The empirical findings suggest that the incorporation of skewness into an investor’s portfolio decision causes a major change in the resultant optimal portfolio. The empirical evidence indicates that investors do trade expected return of the portfolio for skewness.

Studying the only mandatory pre-IPO market in the world—Taiwan’s Emerging Stock Market (ESM)—we document that pre-market prices are very informative about post-market prices and that informativeness increases with a stock’s liquidity. The ESM price-earnings ratio shortly before an initial public offering explains about 90% of the variation in the offer price-earnings ratio. However, the average IPO underpricing level remains high, at 55%, suggesting that agency problems between underwriters and issuers can lead to excessive underpricing, even with little valuation uncertainty. Also, regulations impact the relative bargaining power of players and therefore IPO pricing. Received June 4, 2014; accepted April 13, 2016 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.