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Matching Premiums in the Executive Labor Market

The Accounting Review 2019 94(6), 109-136
ABSTRACT We study whether executives receive pay premiums for the uncertainty of their match with a new firm. Using changes in executive-firm matches from Execucomp, we document that executives receive significant attraction premiums when they move to new firms. These premiums vary with proxies that capture potential sources of uncertainty about the quality of the match, and are incremental to pay for managerial talent, generalist ability, industry turnover risk, and potential additional costs incurred by the new employer to attract the executive to the firm, such as payments for forfeited equity and relocation costs. Consistent with compensation for uncertainty of fit, we find that the premiums decrease with the executive's tenure at the new firm, as the uncertainty about the executive-firm match is resolved over time. Our findings raise the possibility that attraction premiums are an additional cost of executive turnover and may contribute to the overall rise in executive pay. JEL Classifications: J24; J33; M12; M52. Data Availability: Data are available from sources cited in the text.

Corporate Diversification and the Cost of Debt: The Role of Segment Disclosures

The Accounting Review 2016 91(4), 1139-1165
ABSTRACT Previous theoretical arguments suggest that industrial diversification provides a co-insurance effect that decreases the firm's default risk. In this paper, we endogenously estimate a firm's segment disclosure quality and investigate whether the quality of segment disclosures significantly affects bond investors' assessment of the co-insurance effect of diversification. We document that bonds issued by industrially diversified firms with high-quality segment disclosures have significantly lower yields than bonds issued by diversified firms with low-quality segment disclosures. We also find that the negative relation between industrial diversification and bond yields becomes stronger when firms improve segment disclosures as a result of FAS 131. Finally, we show that high-quality segment disclosures are associated with lower syndicated loan spreads for a subsample of loans issued by large bank syndicates, which are more likely to rely on publicly reported segment information. JEL Classifications: G31; G32; M10; O16.